Schematic of SpaGene and simulation results. (A) Schematic of SpaGene. (B) Visualization of five spatial patterns. (C) Area under the curve (AUC) plots of SpaGene (red), SpatialDE (gray), and SPARK-X (blue) in simulated data sets with different effect sizes (x-axis) and pattern sizes (point shapes) and 10,000 genes and 1000 cells/locations. Simulated data were generated from negative binomial distributions.