sourmash_plugin_betterplot

sourmash is a tool for biological sequence analysis and comparisons.

betterplot is a sourmash plugin that provides improved plotting/viz and cluster examination for sourmash-based sketch comparisons. It includes better similarity matrix plotting, MDS plots, and clustermaps, as well as support for coloring samples based on categories. It also includes support for sparse comparison output formats produced by the fast multithreaded manysearch and pairwise functions in the branchwater plugin for sourmash.

Why does this plugin exist?

sourmash compare and sourmash plot produce basic distance matrix plots that are useful for comparing and visualizing the relationships between dozens to hundreds of genomes. And this is one of the most popular use cases for sourmash!

However, the visualization can be improved a lot beyond the basic viz that sourmash plot produces. There are a lot of only slightly more complicated use cases for comparing, clustering, and visualizing many genomes!

And this plugin exists to explore some of these use cases!

General goals:

• provide a variety of plotting and exploration commands that can be used with sourmash tools;
• provide both command-line functionality and functions that can be imported and used in Jupyter notebooks;
• (maybe) explore other backends than matplotlib;

and who knows what else??

What does this plugin provide?

As of v0.4, the betterplot plugin provides:

• improved similarity matrix visualization, along with cluster extraction;
• multidimensional scaling (MDS) plots;
• t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (tSNE) plots;
• non-square matrix visualization for the output of manysearch;
• an upset plot to visualize intersections between sketches;
• a utility function to convert pairwise output into a similarity matrix;
• a utility function to convert cluster output into color categories;

Installation

pip install sourmash_plugin_betterplot

Usage

See the examples below for some example command lines and output, and use command-line help (-h/--help) to see available options.

Labels on plots: the labels-to CSV file.

The labels-to CSV file taken by most (all?) of the comparison matrix plotting functions (e.g. plot2, plot3, mds) is the same format output by sourmash compare ... --labels-to <file> and loaded by sourmash plot --labels-from <file>. The format is hopefully obvious, but there are a few things to mention -

• the sort_order column specifies the order of the columns with respect to the samples in the distance matrix. This is there to support arbitrary re-arranging and processing of the CSV file.
• the label column is the name that will be displayed on the plot, as well as for the default "categories" CSV matching (see below). You can edit this by hand (spreadsheet, text editor) or programmatically.
• as a side note, the labels.txt file output by sourmash compare is entirely ignored ;).

Categories on plots: the "categories" CSV file

One of the nice features of the betterplot functions is the ability to provide categories that color the plots. This is critical for some plots - for example, the mds and mds2 plots don't make much sense without colors! - and nice for other plots, like plot3 and clustermap1, where you can color columns/rows by category.

To make use of this feature, you need to provide a "categories" CSV file (typically -C/--categories-csv). This file is reasonably flexible in format; it must contain at least two columns, one named category, but can contain more as long as category is provided.

The simplest possible categories CSV format is shown in 10sketches-categories.csv, and it contains two columns, label and category. When this file is loaded, label is matched to the name of each point/row/column, and that point is then assigned that category.

Additional flexibility is provided by the column matching.

Some restrictions of / observations on the current implementation:

• if a categories CSV is provided, every point must have an associated category. It should be possible to have MORE many points and categories - checkme, @CTB!
• there is currently no way to specify a specific color for a category; they get assigned at random.
• it is entirely OK to edit the labels file (see above) and just add a category column. This won't be picked up by the code automatically - you'll need to specify the same file via -C - but it works fine!

Examples

The command lines below are executable in the examples/ subdirectory of the repository after installing the plugin.

plot2 - basic 3 sketches example

Compare 3 sketches with sourmash compare, and cluster.

This command:

sourmash compare sketches/{2,47,63}.sig.zip -o 3sketches.cmp
    --labels-to 3sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv

sourmash scripts plot2 3sketches.cmp 3sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv \
    -o examples/plot2.3sketches.cmp.png

produces this plot:

plot2 - 3 sketches example with a cut line: plot2 --cut-point 1.2

Compare 3 sketches with sourmash compare, cluster, and show a cut point.

This command:

sourmash compare sketches/{2,47,63}.sig.zip -o 3sketches.cmp
    --labels-to 3sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv

sourmash scripts plot2 3sketches.cmp 3sketches.cmp.labels_to_csv \
    -o examples/plot2.cut.3sketches.cmp.png \
    --cut-point=1.2

produces this plot:

plot2 - dendrogram of 10 sketches with a cut line + cluster extraction

Compare 10 sketches with sourmash compare, cluster, and use a cut point to extract multiple clusters. Use --dendrogram-only to plot just the dendrogram.

This command:

sourmash compare sketches/{2,47,48,49,51,52,53,59,60}.sig.zip \
    -o 10sketches.cmp \
    --labels-to 10sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv

sourmash scripts plot2 10sketches.cmp 10sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv \
    -o plot2.cut.dendro.10sketches.cmp.png \
    --cut-point=1.35 --cluster-out --dendrogram-only

produces this plot:

as well as a set of 6 clusters to 10sketches.cmp.*.csv.

mds- multidimensional Scaling (MDS) from sourmash compare output

Use MDS to display a comparison generated by sourmash compare.

These commands:

sourmash compare sketches/{2,47,48,49,51,52,53,59,60}.sig.zip \
    -o 10sketches.cmp \
    --labels-to 10sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv

sourmash scripts mds 10sketches.cmp 10sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv \
    -o mds.10sketches.cmp.png \
    -C 10sketches-categories.csv

produces this plot:

mds2 - multidimensional Scaling (MDS) plot from pairwise output

Use MDS to display a sparse comparison created using the branchwater plugin's pairwise command. The output of pairwise is distinct from the sourmash compare output: pairwise produces a sparse CSV file that contains just the matches above threshold, while sourmash compare produces a dense numpy matrix.

These commands:

sourmash sig cat sketches/{2,47,48,49,51,52,53,59,60}.sig.zip \
    -o 10sketches.sig.zip
sourmash scripts pairwise 10sketches.sig.zip -o 10sketches.pairwise.csv

sourmash scripts mds 10sketches.cmp \
    -o mds.10sketches.cmp.png \
    -C 10sketches-categories.csv

produces this plot:

cluster_to_categories - convert clusters from cluster into categories

The sourmash scripts cluster command from the branchwater plugin will cluster pairwise output; cluster_to_categories converts these clusters into a categories CSV that can be used to color points and columns/rows.

These commands:

# generate pairwise comparison
sourmash scripts pairwise 64sketches.sig.zip -o 64sketches.pairwise.csv \
    --write-all

# generate clusters
sourmash scripts cluster 64sketches.pairwise.csv \
    -o 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.csv \
    --similarity jaccard -t 0 

# convert to categories CSV
sourmash scripts cluster_to_categories 64sketches.pairwise.csv \
    64sketches.pairwise.clusters.csv -o 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.cats.csv

produce 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.cats.csv, which categorizes the input samples based on their cluster membership.

tsne - tSNE plot of comparisons from sourmash compare output

t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is another method for visualizing high-dimensional data in two dimensions. The tsne command displays a comparison generated by sourmash compare.

These commands:

sourmash compare 64sketches.sig.zip -o 64sketches.cmp \
    --labels-to 64sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv
    
sourmash scripts tsne 64sketches.cmp 64sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv \
    -C 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.cats.csv -o tsne.64sketches.cmp.png

produce this plot:

(The 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.cats.csv is generated by the cluster_to_categories command above.)

tsne2 - tSNE plot of comparisons from pairwise output.

These commands:

sourmash scripts pairwise 64sketches.sig.zip -o 64sketches.pairwise.csv \
    --write-all
    
sourmash scripts tsne2 64sketches.pairwise.csv \
    -C 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.cats.csv -o tsne2.64sketches.cmp.png

produce this plot:

(The 64sketches.pairwise.clusters.cats.csv is generated by the cluster_to_categories command above.)

pairwise_to_matrix - convert pairwise output to sourmash compare output and plot

Convert the sparse comparison CSV (created using the branchwater plugin's pairwise command) into a sourmash compare-style similarity matrix.

These commands:

# build pairwise
sourmash sig cat sketches/{2,47,48,49,51,52,53,59,60}.sig.zip \
    -o 10sketches.sig.zip
sourmash scripts pairwise 10sketches.sig.zip -o 10sketches.pairwise.csv

# convert pairwise
sourmash scripts pairwise_to_matrix 10sketches.pairwise.csv \
    -o 10sketches.pairwise.cmp --write-all \
    --labels-to 10sketches.pairwise.cmp.labels_to.csv
    
# plot!
sourmash scripts plot2 10sketches.pairwise.cmp \
    10sketches.pairwise.cmp.labels_to.csv \
    -o plot2.pairwise.10sketches.cmp.png

produce this plot:

plot3 - seaborn clustermap with color categories

Plot a sourmash compare similarity matrix using the seaborn clustermap, which offers some nice visualization options.

These commands:

sourmash compare sketches/{2,47,48,49,51,52,53,59,60}.sig.zip \
    -o 10sketches.cmp \
    --labels-to 10sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv

sourmash scripts plot3 10sketches.cmp 10sketches.cmp.labels_to.csv \
    -o plot3.10sketches.cmp.png -C 10sketches-categories.csv

produce this plot:

clustermap1 - seaborn clustermap for non-symmetric matrices

Plot the sparse comparison CSV (created using the branchwater plugin's manysearch command) using seaborn's clustermap. Supports separate category coloring on rows and columns.

These commands:

sourmash sig cat sketches/{2,47,48,49,51,52,53,59,60}.sig.zip \
    -o 10sketches.sig.zip

sourmash scripts manysearch 10sketches.sig.zip \
    sketches/shew21.sig.zip -o 10sketches.manysearch.csv

sourmash scripts clustermap1 10sketches.manysearch.csv \
    -o clustermap1.10sketches.png
    -u containment -R 10sketches-categories.csv

produce:

upset - plot sketch intersections using UpSetPlot

Plot an UpSetPlot of the intersections between sketches.

This command:

sourmash scripts upset 10sketches.sig.zip -o 10sketches.upset.png

produces:

Support

We suggest filing issues in the main sourmash issue tracker as that receives more attention!

Dev docs

betterplot is developed at https://github.com/sourmash-bio/sourmash_plugin_betterplot.

See environment.yml for the dependencies needed to develop betterplot.

Testing

Run:

make examples

to run the examples.

For now, the examples serve as the tests; eventually we will add unit tests.

Generating a release

Bump version number in pyproject.toml and push.

Make a new release on github.

Then pull, and:

python -m build

followed by twine upload dist/....

CTB June 2024