[Bioc-devel] transitioning scater/scran to SingleCellExperiment
On 08/08/2017 03:59 AM, Angerer, Philipp wrote:
Hi Aaron, I guess this would be a question for the SummarizedExperiment developers, though personally, I never liked ExpressionSet's inclination to slap names on everything. Too bad we?re bound to SummarizedExperiment?s ?rows? and ?cols?. Since they always refer to features and samples, respectively: Why not name them that?
Language is a funny thing. In the ExpressionSet world, 'features' were actually a misnomer, since they refer to spots (probes) on the microarray, rather than summarized expression values of individual genes. Rectangular data from other assays might well label the observations made on each sample as something different from 'feature'. Likewise, the columns were called 'phenoData', describing the phenotypes of the samples, but phenotype has a different meanings in different disciplines (hey wait, my experiment used two genetically different mice, we're talking about _geno_types, not phenotypes!). And of course 'sample' has statistical meanings that only sometimes applies. In the end it seemed better to use generic terms for a data class meant for general use. Martin
There?s already too many APIs in too many programming languages that confusingly have one or the other convention ? if whe know which is which, why not name them after that knowledge? BQ_BEGIN It probably wouldn't be a good idea to store distances as expression matrices. However, if there is a need for it, we can add a new slot for distance matrices. I think SC3 has a similar requirement, so perhaps this would be more generally useful than I first thought. You can post an issue on the github repository to remind Davide or me to do it. BQ_END Distance matrices (cell?cell) can?t only come from cell?gene matrices. You can e.g. use dynamic time warping to create them from cell?gene?time arrays. BQ_BEGIN Finally, I'm not sure what advantages those ergonomics provide. Indeed, if every package defines its own plot() S4 method for SingleCellExperiment, they will clobber each other in the dispatch table, resulting in some interesting results dependent on package loading order. If you have destiny-specific data and methods, best to keep them separate rather than stuffing them into the SCE object. BQ_END I wrote that I could e.g. create a plot_dm method, which plots a diffusion map stored in a SCE. Also I didn?t mean the plot method with ergonomics. I meant fortify , names , $ , and [[ . Those would be very useful, as you could just do things like the following, and have autocompletion: sce$Predicate1 <- sce$SampleMeta1 > 40 # `$` accesses counts (by gene) and rowData. `$<-` sets rowData qplot(Gene1, Gene2, colour = Predicate1, data = sce) # fortify creates a data.frame containing cbind(t(counts), rowData) Just as you can do now with DiffusionMap objects. Also I?m not sure if i got rowData and the ?t? right in the above code ;) I meant cbind(counts as cell?gene, sampleMeta as cell?n_meta) Best, Phil Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Gesundheit und Umwelt (GmbH) Ingolstaedter Landstr. 1 85764 Neuherberg www.helmholtz-muenchen.de Aufsichtsratsvorsitzende: MinDir'in Baerbel Brumme-Bothe Geschaeftsfuehrer: Prof. Dr. Guenther Wess, Heinrich Bassler, Dr. Alfons Enhsen Registergericht: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 6466 USt-IdNr: DE 129521671 [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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