Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.08.13.249623v1?rss=1 Authors: Ahlmann-Eltze, C., Huber, W. Abstract: Motivation: The Gamma-Poisson distribution is a theoretically and empirically motivated model for the sampling variability of single cell RNA-sequencing counts (Grün et al., 2014; Townes et al., 2019; Svensson, 2020; Silverman et al., 2018; Hafemeister and Satija, 2019) and an essential building block for analysis approaches including differential expression analysis (Robinson et al., 2010; McCarthy et al., 2012; Anders and Huber, 2010; Love et al., 2014), principal component analysis (Townes et al., 2019) and factor analysis(Risso et al., 2018). Existing implementations for inferring its parameters from data often struggle with the size of single cell datasets, which typically comprise thousands or millions of cells; at the same time, they do not take full advantage of the fact that zero and other small numbers are frequent in the data. These limitations have hampered uptake of the model, leaving room for statistically inferior approaches such as logarithm(-like) transformation. Results: We present a new R package for fitting the Gamma-Poisson distribution to data with the characteristics of modern single cell datasets more quickly and more accurately than existing methods. The software can work with data on disk without having to load them into RAM simultaneously. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info