How does OUTRIDER deal with sex chromosomes? i.e. does it need to know the sex beforehand?

[vyepez88]

OUTRIDER automatically infers the genetic sex from the expression. We showcase this below in real data. We can see the raw read counts plotted against OUTRIDER’s expectations for three genes XIST and DMD on the X chromosome and UTY on the Y chromosome. OUTRIDER expects few counts for males for the gene XIST which is not expressed in males. DMD is expressed in both males and females and hence OUTRIDER models expected counts for both sexes. Finally, the Y chromosome gene UTY is not expressed in females thus not expected to have any counts for females, while expectations are modelled for males.
Hence, no explicit treatment of sexes is needed in an OUTRIDER analysis. However, it may be good to check in case the sexes are imbalanced within a dataset.