Auditable recovery of single-cell RNA-seq zeros with SPARE (opens in new tab)

In Single-cell RNA-seq, observed zeroes are the mix between biological absence and technical limitations. However, current evaluation metrics fail to distinguish between these two states, focusing on reconstruction accuracy rather than the biological validity of edits. We introduce SPARE, a partition-aware framework that audits the imputation process by cataloging observed zeros as edited, unchanged, or marker-vetoed prior to sequence reconstruction. Across multiple tissue benchmarks, SPARE s...