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It's a nice visualization system when you have a lot of very long one-dimensional things with nonlinear relationships. This is super common in genomics but in p
by inciampati 2y ago
It's a nice visualization system when you have a lot of very long one-dimensional things with nonlinear relationships. This is super common in genomics but in principle could be applied many places.
That said, circos plots are sort of cliche in genomics and I do see people tending to move away from them.
It suffers from an effect of having too many things all together, all at once, layered in ways that sometimes make it difficult to compare. This is especially true when you have data tracks that are circularly laid out around the plot.
- aorth 2y agoCame to say something similar. I've been installing and updating Circos on our HPC cluster for bioinformatics users for over ten years. It was really popular in the early and mid 2010s!
- mbreese 2y agoI have used circos plots many times in the past (genomics). They make for very pretty figures. But, like you said, the major problem with them is that they are difficult to accurately interpret. They are used often to compare whole genome rearrangements, but the resolution has to be reduced to so much that you just can’t use them quantitatively. They are useful for qualitative comparisons, but it really suffers when you need to show details.
- a_bonobo 2y agoYes, but they are pretty. Case in point: the maize genome Circos plot popped up in Jurassic World, they just overlayed an image of a Triceratops https://circos.ca/images/mastheads/ https://circos.ca/images/mastheads/
- tetris11 2y agoYep, if you want to compare clusters from sample A with clusters from sample B, then it's just easier to use a sankey diagram, especially for time-series data.