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Describe Limitations for UMAP Plot

Open cannin opened this issue 6 years ago • 2 comments

@MercifulCode Are there limitations to the annotations that are displayed in the UMAP plot? I think HUMAN does not appear for these example files:

https://github.com/dfci/alignmentviewer/tree/master/example

cannin avatar Dec 10 '19 20:12 cannin

I think the example annotation file is a bit out of date - there should not be a header, and the last character for each sequence name is missing.

That said, after digging some more into the bioblocks-viz code, I found that indeed there is a limitation to the number of annotations displayed!

Internally, UMAPSequenceContainerClass sets the colors associated with each label using this a predefined array of colors. If there are more labels than colors, the remaining labels are classified as "unannotated."

Going forward, I see a few possible solutions:

  1. Allowing the set of colors to use to be passed to the component as well.
  2. A flag to re-use colors if the limit is hit.
  3. In the case of too many labels, renaming "Unnannotated" to something better.
  4. Paginating the labels - for example, if there's 40 unique labels but only 10 colors, we'd have 4 pages of labels.

I'm leaning towards both options 1 & 2, as that way all labels can be viewable at once. That said, if we increase the number of labels to display, the labels would need to be placed inside a scrollable list to prevent overflow.

What do you think?

drew-diamantoukos avatar Dec 11 '19 17:12 drew-diamantoukos

@MercifulCode we talked a bit yesterday. Some of the suggestions were:

  • Scroll to see more annotation labels
  • Use color/shape combinations to have more possible options of annotations
  • Allow developers, to pass SVG or PNGs pointers to customize the annotation display themselves

cannin avatar Dec 13 '19 21:12 cannin