PsiNorm: a scalable normalization for single-cell RNA-seq data

Motivation: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables transcriptome-wide gene expression measurements at single-cell resolution providing a comprehensive view of the compositions and dynamics of tissue and organism development. The evolution of scRNA-seq protocols has led to a dramatic increase of cells throughput, exacerbating many of the computational and statistical issues that previously arose for bulk sequencing. In particular, with scRNA-seq data all the analyses steps, including normalization, have become computationally intensive, both in terms of memory usage and computational time. In this perspective, new accuratemethods able to scale efficiently are desirable. Results: Here, we propose PsiNorm, a between-sample normalization method based on the power-law Pareto distribution parameter estimate. Here, we show that the Pareto distribution well resembles scRNA-seq data, especially those coming from platforms that use unique molecular identifiers. Motivated by this result, ...