Fig. 1

More cells, more zeros. Binarized scRNA-seq datasets were generated by binarizing the raw count matrix, where zero remains zero and every non-zero value is assigned a one. A Association between year of publication, total number of cells. Scatterplot of the number of cells (log scale) against the date of publication. B Scatterplot of the detection rate (y-axis) against the number of cells (log scale, x-axis). C On the x-axis the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (p) of every cell from the PaulHSC dataset between the binarized and normalized expressions. On the y-axis the product of the detection rate and the variance of the non-zero values (q). α is the Pearson’s correlation coefficient between these values p and q across all cells. D Boxplots of the α-values for all 56 datasets grouped by technology. One dataset (LawlorPancreasData) was excluded as α-value (α = 0.42) for this dataset was a clear outlier