Morphing projections: a new visual technique for fast and interactive large-scale analysis of biomedical datasets.

Abstract

Biomedical research entails analyzing high dimensional records of biomedical features with hundreds or thousands of samples each. This often involves using also complementary clinical metadata, as well as a broad user domain knowledge. Common data analytics software makes use of machine learning algorithms or data visualization tools. However, they are frequently one-way analyses, providing little room for the user to reconfigure the steps in light of the observed results. In other cases, reconfigurations involve large latencies, requiring a retraining of algorithms or a large pipeline of actions. The complex and multiway nature of the problem, nonetheless, suggests that user interaction feedback is a key element to boost the cognitive process of analysis, and must be both broad and fluid. In this article, we present a technique for biomedical data analytics, based on blending meaningful views in an efficient manner, allowing to provide a natural smooth way to transition among different but complementary representations of data and knowledge. Our hypothesis is that the confluence of diverse complementary information from different domains on a highly interactive interface allows the user to discover relevant relationships or generate new hypotheses to be investigated by other means. We illustrate the potential of this approach with three case studies involving gene expression data and clinical metadata, as representative examples of high dimensional, multidomain, biomedical data. Code and demo app to reproduce the results available at https://gitlab.com/idiazblanco/morphing-projections-demo-and-dataset-preparation. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.