scCODE: an R package for personalized differentially expressed gene detection on single-cell RNA-sequencing data

Abstract Differential expression (DE) gene detection in single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data is a key step to understand the biological question investigated. We find that DE methods together with gene filtering have profound impact on DE gene identification, and different datasets will benefit from personalized DE gene detection strategies. Existing tools don’t take gene filtering into consideration, and couldn’t evaluate DE performance on real datasets without prior knowledge of true results. Based on two new metrics, we propose scCODE (single cell Consensus Optimization of Differentially Expressed gene detection), an R package to automatically optimize DE gene detection for each experimental scRNA-seq dataset.