Data analysis made easy. For biologists, especially.
Heatmaps. We see them all over the scientific journals — the shading matrices that convey meaningful stories. Wanna interpret gene expressions? Draw a heatmap. Gotta examine the correlation among variables? Get it done with a heatmap. It seems that the shading has breathed such life into those cheerless matrices of […]
Principal component analysis (PCA) has been gaining popularity as a tool to bring out strong patterns from complex biological datasets. We have answered the question “What is a PCA?” in this jargon-free blog post — check it out for a simple explanation of how PCA works. In a nutshell, PCA capture […]
As we are entering the era of Big Data, everyone and their moms seem to be talking about PCA. All the papers you read mention PCA (with lots of jargon, of course). Half of the seminars you’ve been to this month touch on PCA. Your boss/collaborators suggest trying PCA on your data. “What […]
We showed a quick and easy way to compare box plots in previous post. Let’s dig deeper into what information you can use to compare two box plots. Overlapping boxes and medians It gets tricky when the boxes overlap and their median lines are inside the overlap range. As always, math comes to […]
Box plots, a.k.a. box-and-whiskers plots, are an excellent way to visualize differences among groups. They manage to carry a lot of statistical details — medians, ranges, outliers — without looking intimidating. But box plots are not always intuitive to read. How do you compare two box plots? The key information […]
1. Violin graph is like box plot, but better Box-and-whisker plots are great. They show medians, ranges and variabilities effectively. They allow comparing groups of different sizes. They are super simple to create and read, so naturally, they are all over the place. But box plots can be misleading. They are not […]
Box plots, a.k.a box-and-whisker plots, are an excellent way to compare groups. They are intuitive: viewers can see samples’ medians, distribution, and variabilities with a quick glance. They allow comparing samples of different sizes; for example, a set of 50 data points with a set of 30. They don’t even […]
Venn diagram is an excellent tool to visualize the relationship among sets. Ideally, the sizes of the circles and their overlapping area should be proportional to the relationship they convey. It is, however, quite a challenge to create a proportional Venn diagram. No worries: With BioVinci, you can get this job done […]
Writing a scientific paper? Preparing for publication? Making a poster for a conference tomorrow? Let’s face it: People will skim through the body text of your paper/poster, and only look at the figures. We all love figures. They catch eyes, they deliver information effectively, they highlight your results. Figures are […]
Heatmap, heatmap everywhere. They are an intuitive way to visualize information from complex data. You see them showing gene expression, phylogenetic distance, metabolomic profiles, and a whole lot more. In this tutorial, we will show you how to perform hierarchical clustering and produce a heatmap with your data using BioVinci. It’s […]
When your data span a large range, the graphs tend to get ugly. Values either crowd at the bottom or spread out at the top — a problem called poor resolution. The rate of changes is hard to display, since the graph usually has a very long tail, or a very […]
When it comes to presenting data, visuals are your friend, or so we all heard. Tables are better than large blocks of text and numbers. Graphs and charts are better than tables. Then it becomes irresistible to enliven your graphs and charts with colors, patterns, grid lines, labels, and the […]
