smaller expression value after imputation?

[chansigit]

Hi,

I ran dca with scanpy and checked the maximum value of the matrix,

np.max(adata_imputed.X)
185.14267

which is even smaller than the original raw counts' maximum

np.max(adata.layers["counts"])
296

How shall I explain such a phenomenon? My personal explanation would be, dca is an AE-based denoiser, not guaranteed to be a missing data imputing tool. Am I right? can you give me more explanation from the AE theoretical principle?

Look forward to your reply. Thanks.