SCRaPL: hierarchical Bayesian modelling of associations in single cell multi-omics data

Single-cell multi-omics assays offer unprecedented opportunities to explore gene regulation at cellular level. However, high levels of technical noise and data sparsity frequently lead to a lack of statistical power in correlative analyses,identifying very few, if any, significant associations between different molecular layers. Here we propose SCRaPL, a novel computational tool that increases power by carefully modelling noise in the experimental systems. We show on real and simulated multi-omics single-cell data sets that SCRaPL achieves higher sensitivity and better robustness in identifying correlations, while maintaining a similar level of false positives as standard analyses based on Pearson correlation.