Assessing 2D visual encoding of 3D spatial connectivity.
Front Bioinform
; 3: 1232671, 2023.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38323038
ABSTRACT
Introduction:
When visualizing complex data, the layout method chosen can greatly affect the ability to identify outliers, spot incorrect modeling assumptions, or recognize unexpected patterns. Additionally, visual layout can play a crucial role in communicating results to peers.Methods:
In this paper, we compared the effectiveness of three visual layouts-the adjacency matrix, a half-matrix layout, and a circular layout-for visualizing spatial connectivity data, e.g., contacts derived from chromatin conformation capture experiments. To assess these visual layouts, we conducted a study comprising 150 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, as well as a second expert study comprising 30 biomedical research scientists.Results:
The Mechanical Turk study found that the circular layout was the most accurate and intuitive, while the expert study found that the circular and half-matrix layouts were more accurate than the matrix layout.Discussion:
We concluded that the circular layout may be a good default choice for visualizing smaller datasets with relatively few spatial contacts, while, for larger datasets, the half- matrix layout may be a better choice. Our results also demonstrated how crowdsourcing methods could be used to determine which visual layouts are best for addressing specific data challenges in bioinformatics.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Language:
En
Journal:
Front Bioinform
Year:
2023
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Australia