# Update 6.1.3 on CRAN, postdoc position, manuscript and upcoming workshops

Dear mixOmics users,

We have been quiet for a while, but we have some good news! A CRAN update, a manuscript in bioRxiv, a 3-year postdoc position open to be part of the mixOmics core team, and three workshops planned for the French autumn!

The 6.1.3 update is now on the CRAN, we fixed a few bugs (see list below), and we also have a new plotIndiv argument ‘background‘ to visualise the prediction area for a PLS-DA and sPLS-DA model (max 2 components). This is a powerful plot to visualise the effect of the different prediction methods. Why does a prediction method matters for the performance of the discriminant analysis models? See elements of information below.

Example of prediction area plot for the SRBCT data with a PLS-DA model, see ?srbct

All you need is the background.predict function, and overlay the results with plotIndiv. For example:

data(liver.toxicity)
X = liver.toxicity$gene Y = as.factor(liver.toxicity$treatment[, 4])
plsda.liver = plsda(X, Y, ncomp = 2)

# calculating background for the two first components, and the mahalanobis distance
background = background.predict(plsda.liver, comp.predicted = 2, dist = "mahalanobis.dist")

plotIndiv(plsda.liver, background = background, legend = TRUE)



We also added the new functions get.confusion_matrix and get.BER to calculate a confusion matrix based on class prediction of test samples and their real class, and calculate their Balanced Error Rate, see ?get.BER. Example of outputs (for a DIABLO analysis on the breast cancer TCGA multi omics study):

Example from our DIABLO pipeline available at http://mixomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/mixOmicsRscripts.zip

We have submitted a new version of our mixOmics manuscript to bioRxiv! The manuscript is available at this link and has been a top tweeted story in #bioinformatics. The manuscript mostly summarises the latest mixOmics frameworks for Discriminant Analysis (sPLS-DA, DIABLO and MINT) with extensive R and Sweave codes here, give it a go! The supplemental thoroughly details these methods. It almost sounds like an end of a first mixOmics era as Florian, our very talented and dedicated core developer, debugger and developer of MINT has moved on for another postdoctoral position at the University of Queensland, and Kim-Anh is starting her new group as a Senior Lecturer position at the University of Melbourne (UoM), at the Centre for Systems Genomics. Do not fear, this means there will be a new round of developments, notably in the microbiome and metagenomics field, as we are opening a new 3-year senior postdoctoral position in Computational Biostatistics at UoM (with opportunity to teach at the School of Mathematics and Statistics). More details at this link.

Seventeen multivariate methods currently implemented in mixOmics! Can you recognise your favourite?

Three workshops are coming up, between Sept – Nov 2017 in France. The first edition of MAW’17 is the advanced mixOmics workshop to introduce our new frameworks (published and in development: DIABLO, MINT, SNPOmics, timeOmics, mixMC and extension of integration) to our advanced users. The workshop is free, but you will need to cover your own travel and accommodation costs. Toulouse, 23-24 Oct 2017. Send us an email and we can send you the details. The two other workshops will be our normal beginner mixOmics workshops, in September (Lille) and in early November (Toulouse). More details on our website soon.

Other enhancements and bug fixes:

Enhancements:
————-
1 – perf.sgccda (for DIABLO) now implements a constraint model (see details in ?perf)
2 – legend = TRUE option in circosPlot and plotDiablo
Bug fixes:
———-
– tune.splsda had a bug when assessing the ‘choice.ncomp’ based on ones-sided t-test of the error rate when the error rate was constant.
– sparse PCA deflation algorithm fixed
– added add mixOmics:: for pls functions to avoid clash with other packages

Why does a prediction distance matter? (full story in our manuscript)

The supervised multivariate methods in mixOmics can be applied on an external test set to predict the outcome of new samples with the predict function (predict), or to assess the performance of the statistical model (perf). The predict function calculates prediction scores for each new sample, or predicted coordinates, which are equivalent to the latent component scores in the training set.

Prediction distances. Our supervised models work with dummy indicator matrices Y to indicate the class membership of each sample, and result in a prediction score for each outcome category k, k = 1, . . . , K. Therefore, the scores across all classes K need to be combined to obtain the final prediction of a given test sample using a prediction distance. We propose distances such as ‘maximum distance’, ‘Mahalanobis distance’ and ‘Centroids distance’, as detailed our supplemental information and in ?predict. Those distance can give different predictions, which will be assessed in the performance of the model.

This entry was posted in News, Updates and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.