Assessment of dispersion metrics for estimating single-cell transcriptional variability
Fig 2
VMR is most sensitive to changes in dispersion.
(A) Heatmaps of each metric applied to simulated counts drawn from instances of the negative binomial distribution. The dispersion in the sampling distributions increases across the y-axis, as determined by the size parameter r for the negative binomial. The size of the simulated data increases across the x-axis, as determined by the number of cells in each counts matrix. (B) Heatmaps of relative change in each metric applied to counts from (A). (C) Histograms of deviation of relative change from mean relative change for each metric as calculated from the distributions described in (A). (D - F) Same as above for counts simulated from the beta-Poisson distribution. The theoretical variance increases as determined by a scaling factor on the β parameter.