This webinar was presented for a seminar to a group of quantitative researchers (mostly statisticians) at the University of Melbourne. Abstract is below. Topics covered: context of data integration, PCA solved with NIPALS algorithm and SVD, sparse PCA, correlation circle plot interpretation, PLS algorithms and deflation modes, sparse PLS. Technological … Continue reading Webinar: PLS methods
I presented this talk for a group of statisticians at the Australian National University in Canberra. The abstract is below. Topics covered: linear mixed model splines, multi-omics integration (PLS multiblock), correlation circle plot interpretation, timeOmics. Longitudinal experiments are becoming increasingly popular in omics studies to monitor molecular changes following treatment … Continue reading Webinar: Time-course multi-omics integration
Feedback from a previous iteration can be found here. Key summary The new course is open and will run for 7 weeks. This course is online, but at your own pace, meaning that you need to dedicate enough time (5-8h per week) to fully benefit from the program. There are 4 weeks of asynchronous learning (you … Continue reading [open] Self-paced online course Feb 24 – April 11, 2025
We have developed a new PLS method for cell type continuous annotation of single cells, now in preprint! Φ-Space: Continuous phenotyping of single-cell multi-omics data. Jiadong Mao, Yidi Deng, Kim-Anh Lê Cao. bioRxiv 2024. View this 52min video of Kim-Anh Lê Cao presenting Φ-Space at the WEHI Bioinformatics seminar: Abstract. Single-cell multi-omics technologies have empowered … Continue reading Webinar: Φ-Space for continuous phenotyping of single-cell multi-omics data
These two recordings were part of a presentation to WEHI for their postgraduate lecture series for a diverse audience. In the PCA presentation (18 min), we explain the concept of linear combination of variables (components) and useful graphical outputs such as correlation circle plots and biplots. In the PLS-DA presentation … Continue reading Webinar: PCA and PLS-DA
Unfortunately we had to cancel the workshop as we did not receive a sufficient number of participants to justify running the workshop at this time. These workshops involve peer review and a cohort feel to provide the best experience to our learners. Register your EOI here and we will let … Continue reading [closed] Self-paced online course Oct 21 – Dec 6 2024
Our latest method based on PLS to infer microbial networks across time is now in preprint! Microbial network inference for longitudinal microbiome studies with LUPINE. Saritha Kodikara, Kim-Anh Lê Cao. bioRxiv 2024.05.08.593086; View this 50min video of Dr Saritha Kodikara presenting her method LUPINE: We also have a second video presented by Prof Kim-Anh Lê Cao who sets … Continue reading Webinar: Microbial network inference for longitudinal microbiome studies with LUPINE
This workshop is now closed. Fill in this short survey to register your interest. A new iteration of the course might be run between Sept – Nov if there is sufficient interest! Key summary The new course is open and will run for 7 weeks. This course is online, but … Continue reading [closed] Self-paced online course Feb 5 – March 22 2024
If you’ve missed out, our next iteration will run from 19th Feb – 5th April 2024. You can fill up this short survey to be notified when we open our next course. Summary The new course is open and will run for 7 weeks. This course is online, but at … Continue reading [closed] Self-paced online course May 22 – July 7 2023
We will be running a 2-day workshop at Frazer Institute, University of Queendland. The workshop will cover 1.5 days of lectures and hands-on, and an additional 0.5 day for discussions and opportunities to analyse your own data (assuming the data are already processed and normalised). Fill the survey so that you can … Continue reading [closed] 13-14 March 2023, Brisbane, Aus
The next iteration of the course will be in September 2023 for a likely duration of 6-8 weeks (it will be advertised 3 months before opening the course). This course is online, but at your own pace, meaning that you need to dedicate enough time (5-8h per week) to fully … Continue reading [Closed] Self-paced online course Oct 31st – Nov 27 2022
We are excited to announce that our book is out, along with several case studies and R scripts available online. Check out this page. It’s been a very (very) long term project, and a great collaboration with Zoe Welham whose dedication and patience helped shape this project into a readable … Continue reading Our book is out!
Our next round of online learning will be 31st October 2022! Some feedback from this course: Overall, this was a great course to take and I wish there would be more stats courses for biologists. Kim Anh is truly an amazing tutor. Approachable and knowledgeable. I am very happy that … Continue reading [Closed] Self paced online course Oct 11 – Nov 7 2021
This workshop will only be run for a specific group of participants. Other online courses will be announced soon! We will ask you to fill the internal survey so that we can tweak the course accordingly. Do not forget to lock in the dates already in your calendar! Context. Advances in … Continue reading [closed] Online workshop (on-demand)
Unfortunately the workshop planned face to face on 28-30 June 2021 will not go ahead because of a Melbourne lockdown that threatens the NZ bubble. Anticipated new dates are 26-29 October. For those who responded to our survey, we have saved your answers for later. For those interested to join … Continue reading [cancelled] 26-29 Oct 2021, Palmerston North, NZ (beginner)
This latest seminar was hosted by Australian BioCommons / EMBL-ABR / ARDC in March 2024. The latest version includes some recent updates (also covered in the other webinars in more details – check them out!) The slides are opened to the community, but don’t forget to acknowledge the presenter if … Continue reading Webinar: mixOmics in 50 minutes
The following workshops will be advertised soon. Some are open to any scientists from any institution. This page will be updated as time evolves (we usually advertise our workshops ~ 4 months in advance). 3 – 5 February 2020, beginner workshop, UWA, Perth, Australia 12-13 March 2020, advanced workshop, L’Oreal, … Continue reading Workshops for 2020
Some feedback from the participants: ‘I liked that simple concepts were explained, to facilitate understanding of the complex ones. It is always nice to recap on the basics’ ‘[It] Provided me with novel insights for my research and how to approach and interpret the data from an integrated statistical/computational and … Continue reading Feb 3-5 2020, Perth, AUS (beginner, omics and microbiome)
Lê Cao team and collaborators from University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) have published their first method to integrate multiple omics data from the same set of biospecimens or individuals (e.g. transcriptomics, proteomics). Their method adopts a systems biology holistic approach by statistically integrating data from multiple biological compartments. Such approach provides improved … Continue reading Multi-omics data integration: method and showcase applications
The mixOmics team will present at the Nordic Precision Medicine Forum in Stockholm, 18-19 march 2019. Sébastien Déjean will give a talk about Data integration: Examining Statistical Methods for the Exploration and Integration of Heterogeneous Biological Data Sets. Nordic Precision Medicine Forum brings together those at the very forefront of … Continue reading Nordic Precision Medicine Forum, 18-19 march 2019
Feedback from the workshop: This time we included several new case studies specifically focused on microbiome applications. We presented new material, including the problem of compositional data, how to detect and assess existing methods for batch effects (Ms Yiwen (Eva) Wang, PhD student) and our first timeOmics pipeline (Dr Olivier … Continue reading April 15 – 17 2019, Melbourne AUS (beginner, microbiome)
Dear all, After 9 years hosted at the R CRAN we are migrating to bioconductor! It’s been a great first journey and we are grateful to the R CRAN for hosting our package. We are now ready for the next adventure. Why are we moving? It is our aspiration to … Continue reading We are moving …. to bioC!
Note: this workshop is primarily restricted to Microbiome Research Network students at UBC until Oct 22 when the registration will be open outside MRN if space is available. About the Workshop The objective of this workshop is to introduce fundamental concepts of multivariate dimension reduction methodologies for biological data analysis. Each methodology … Continue reading Nov 6 2018, Vancouver (microbiome)
We list below some installation requirements to ensure the mixOmics workshop will run smoothly for everyone. Please update / install prior to the workshop to avoid a WIFI backload. Software installation and updates. 0 – Mac OS users only: install X Quartz first https://www.xquartz.org/ 1 – Install the mixOmics package from Bioconductor You … Continue reading Software requirements for 2020 mixOmics workshops
The registrations are now closed as we have reached above and beyond capacity! (53 registrations! Many thanks for your interest!) We will be running a one-day workshop as part of the XXIX International Biometric Conference (IBC 2018). Instructors: Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Dr Sébastien Déjean Organized and sponsored by IBC 2018 … Continue reading July 8 2018, Barcelona, SP (Introductory)
Dear all, The first few months of the year have been busy for us. Thanks to your support, we have been ranked second to the Bioinformatics Peer Prize (57 votes, so close after the winner with 59 votes!). Our entry is listed at this link if you would like to … Continue reading News 2018, workshops 2018 and DIABLO
[The workshop is restricted to WestMead staff only] The objective of this workshop is to introduce the fundamental concepts of multivariate dimension reduction methodologies. Those methods are particularly useful for data exploration and integration of large data sets, and especially in the context of systems biology, or in research areas … Continue reading April 12-13 2018, Sydney, AUS
This was our first workshop on the Melbournian grounds. 34 participants joined the workshop, including 10 ECR and PhD students who received CBRI funding. Some feedback from the workshop from our participants What did you like about that workshop? ‘It was a really good balance between the statistical background and hands-on … Continue reading July 23-25 2018, Melbourne AUS (beginner)
The objective of this advanced workshop is to introduce the fundamental concepts of multivariate dimension reduction methods for the integration of high-throughput biological data sets. The aim of this workshop is to introduce our latest mixOmics integrative frameworks and in particular N-integration with DIABLO where several ‘omics data sets measured on … Continue reading June 7-8 June 2018, Saclay, FR (advanced)
Dear mixOmics friends, users, and adventurers, We are reaching out to you to get your unbiased vote 😉 for the Bioinformatics PeerPrize III where we promote our latest publication in PLoS Computational Biology as a software article. For those not familiar with the package, the little 3min video will give … Continue reading A quick video introduction for mixOmics, vote for us!
We pushed 6.3.1 following a major bug in 6.3.0 when dealing with missing values (especially with DIABLO). Another bug related to the one-sided t-test in the tune functions. All good now. Nipals is also faster to run. A big thank to the users who give us feedback via our bitbucket … Continue reading 6.3.1 on CRAN: bug fixes and latest news
Finally, after many years of hard work developing and implementing the methods, we summarised them into a nice software paper in PLoS Computational Biology, primarily focusing on the supervised analyses. Note that DIABLO is still not published yet (we are working on it!) but a preprint is available on bioRxiv. … Continue reading mixOmics article is out!
A new CRAN version is now available. We have considerably improved the computational time for the tune and perf functions! (see example below). We also fixed some reproducibility issues when using parallel computing with a set seed. The update of the package will require new dependencies: ‘matrixStats’, ‘rARPACK’, ‘gridExtra’ There are … Continue reading Version 6.3.0 and workshop
The Lê Cao lab is opening two research fellow positions based at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Research Fellow in Computational Genomics and Statistics Position number: 0042986. Level B University of Melbourne. Three years fixed term. Applications open until 14th November Apply here. The School for Mathematics and Statistics, and … Continue reading Two postdoc positions available, University of Melbourne, Australia
Dear mixOmics users, Our new update 6.2.0 is now available on CRAN as part of our new version of our manuscript. manuscript & package update: The mixOmics manuscript introducing the supervised and integrative frameworks (PLS-DA, DIABLO block.plsda and MINT) has be updated, along with all the R / Sweave case … Continue reading 6.2.0, 2 postdoc positions and workshops
[Update: 5 spots left, contact us] ]Following last year’s success of our COST workshop, the second edition will be run by Dr Sébastien Déjean and his crew in Toulouse. The event is organised by the local committee at UGSF (Drs Estelle Goulas, Anne-Sophie Blervacq, Anne Creach, Brigitte Huss and Prof Simon Hawkins) Dates: … Continue reading Nov 22-24 2017, Toulouse, FR
Some feedback from our participants to the question: ‘What did you like most about that workshop?’ (Survey Monkey results) Theoretical + practical courses, course materials are really great Regular oral review of the take-home messages The slides and Kim-Anh presentations: very pedagogical The workshop provides the exact combination of theory and … Continue reading Nov 9-10 2017, Toulouse, FR
[Update: the workshop is full subscribed and registrations have closed!] This is the first edition of our advanced workshop, run by Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Sébastien Déjean. The event and Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao’s visit is sponsored by the visiting scientist program INP Toulouse and by the company Methodomics. … Continue reading Oct 23-24 2017, Toulouse, FR, Advanced Workshop
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 … Continue reading Update 6.1.3 on CRAN, postdoc position, manuscript and upcoming workshops
R CRAN update The new patch version of mixOmics is on CRAN. It includes a few bug fixes raised by our users (thank you!) and a few improvements. Florian Rohart has been fiddling really hard with ggplot2 to make a new plotIndiv version that can beautifully handle two legends! … Continue reading Patch 6.1.2 and some updates
Dear mixOmics users, We have a new patch version 6.1.1 available from the CRAN to fix a few bugs by our team or mixOmics users (thank you!) and few enhancements and updates to follow ggplot2 updates. For those using DIABLO, please note points 8 & 9 as we changed the default parameters … Continue reading Patch 6.1.1
One-day mixOmics workshop for the Bioinformatics Festival organised by the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society, Brisbane, Australia. The workshop focuses on multivariate Supervised Analysis (sPLS-DA and DIABLO).
We list below some installation requirements to ensure the mixOmics workshop will run smoothly for everyone. Important reminders. We expect the trainees to have a good working knowledge in R programming (e.g. handling data frame, perform simple calculations and display simple graphical outputs) to be able to fully enjoy the workshop. Attendees are requested … Continue reading Software requirements for mixOmics workshops
Our workshop in Toulouse (3-day) was sponsored by EU COST Action “The quest for tolerant varieties: phenotyping at plant and cellular level (FA1306). and organised by GenoToul Biostat platform, Laboratory of Plant-microbe Interactions (LIPM) and Plant Science Research Laboratory (LRSV). We trained and coached 26 participants and had a great time during the third … Continue reading 12-14 Sept 2016, Toulouse, FR (COST)
We are proud to announce our new update 6.1.0 available on CRAN. It was supposed to be a small patch but we got slightly ahead of ourselves. Special thanks to the mixOmics French’Oz developers, Dr Florian Rohart (University of Queensland, Brisbane) and Mr François Bartolo (Université de Toulouse, France), as … Continue reading Version 6.1.0 and latest publications
We are preparing a patch to fix some small bugs we (and other users) noticed since we released version 6.0.0. The .zip (windows) and .tar.gz (linux / mac) can be downloaded from this page. We plan to push a completed patch on the CRAN end of august 2016. Latest patch update: 18 … Continue reading Patch 6.0.1
Dear mixOmics users, It is with a huge relief and pride (and maybe some slight anticipatory anxiety of that very moment) that we announce the release of mixOmics_6_0_0 on CRAN. We are introducing three novel frameworks, mixMC, mixMINT and mixDIABLO, which are described (as best as we can, given the … Continue reading Version 6.0.0
Dear mixOmics users, It is our pleasure to announce the following mixOmics 3-day workshop organized by INRA in Clermond-Ferrand from 11 to 13 july 2016. More details (in french) in the pdf here.
Dear mixOmics users, It is our pleasure to announce the following mixOmics 3-day workshop sponsored by EU COST Action “The quest for tolerant varieties: phenotyping at plant and cellular level (FA1306). More details in the pdf here. We do offer some travel grants for PhD students and early career researchers. Organized by … Continue reading Sept 12-14 Sept 2016, Toulouse, FR
This was our first workshop of the year! ‘many thanks for that great tutorial’, ‘excellent training, excellent teachers, excellent visual aids’ When : 24-25 March 2015 Where : Nantes Institution : L’Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire, Agroalimentaire et de l’Alimentation Nantes-Atlantique (http://www.oniris-nantes.fr/) Lab : Laboratoire d’Etude des Résidus et des Contaminants dans les aliments (http://www.oniris-nantes.fr/services/laberca/) Teachers : Sébastien Déjean, François … Continue reading March 24-25 2016, Nantes, FR
Well well, 2016 is well under way and we thought we could give you some heads up as of what is happening next for mixOmics. 2015 has been great for us: We ran a total of 5 x 12-day mixOmics workshops (see list below, in Auckland NZ, Birsbane AUS, Paris, … Continue reading mixOmics for 2016
We are proud to introduce a new mixOmics update dedicated mainly to improvements in graphical outputs. The changes are listed below, please note the change of arguments names (promise, we’ll try not do that again). More posts to come about the new functionalities. We are particularly grateful to our … Continue reading mixOmics 5.2.0 (graphical improvements)
Date: 24-25 September 2015, 9.30am – 5.30pm Venue: INRA Jouy-en-Josas, Allée de Vilvert, 78352 Jouy-en-Josas, France ‘paper, pdf and slide great, excellent pedagogy‘ ‘A lot of informations were brought and must be adapted on our complex data. Workshop was well organized and the speech was really clear even if some things … Continue reading Sept 24-25 2015, Jouy-en-Josas, FR
Date: 14-15 September 2015, 9am – 5pm Venue: Salle 131 Bâtiment administratif, INRA Toulouse Auzeville, Chemin de Borde Rouge, 31326 Castanet Tolosan cedex ‘I discovered a lot of new methods and it gives me ideas for future analyses. The practical part of the course is particularly interesting (make it more concret).’ … Continue reading Sept 14-15 2015, Toulouse, FR
Date: 10-11 September 2015, 9am – 5pm Venue: CIRAD – Agricultural Research for Development, Avenue Agropolis, 34000 Montpellier, France. ‘compact but enough information. excellent book‘ ‘les travaux pratiques étaient très clairs, avec les data et les scripts r‘
Following our recent Brisbane workshop, and to prepare the upcoming workshops, we have submitted a patch version 5.1.2 to the CRAN to add the argument ‘col‘ to the function plotIndiv. See also the help file for plotVar, which has a new ggplot2 layout! Changes in 5.1.2 (patches) ================ Enhancements: ————- … Continue reading Patch version 5.1.2
In the last few months we have been busy with our major update. This is quite a major release with additional new features. One major change that will impact all of us is the function plotIndiv. While we have new (sexy) functionalities, the argument ‘col‘ was swapped to ‘group‘. We … Continue reading Update on CRAN 5.1.1 Major changes
Our first Brisbane workshop entitled ‘mixOmics: exploration and integration of ‘omics data‘ is taking place at the Translational Research Institute in sunny Brisbane, where the Lê Cao team is based. The workshop is sponsored by AGTA small grant scheme, QIAGEN and our institutes the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute (UQDI) and the Translational Research … Continue reading Aug 13-14 2015, Brisbane, AUS
Dear mixOmics users, We have submitted an updated version to the CRAN. The changes are listed below. Few points in particular to keep in mind: select.var() was renamed selectVar() (clash with our dependency to the package MASS) we borrowed the function tau.estim() to the RGCCA package in order to estimate the … Continue reading mixOmics 5.0-4 on CRAN
We ran our third workshop at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The event was organised by the Department of Statistics’ Statistical Consulting Centre. For more details go to the Statistical Consulting Centre’s Workshops web page. There were 34 live and 6 online participants. Coming up workshops: Brisbane (End of June 2015) … Continue reading April 9-10 2015, Auckland, NZ
Our paper ‘Novel Multivariate Methods for Integration of Genomics and Proteomics Data: Applications in a Kidney Transplant Rejection Study‘ has just been accepted in OMICS: a journal of integrative Biology, from a collaboration with scientists from the PRevention Of Organ Failure (PROOF), University of British Columbia. It provides a nice case … Continue reading New publication with multiple integration
We ran our second tutorial in Toulouse, hosted by the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and organised by the Plate-formes bio-statistique and bio-informatique GenoToul.
We ran our first mixOmics tutorial as part of the ECCB’14 conference in the beautiful city of Strasbourg. This one-day tutorial was a success and will be followed by other tutorials in 2014 and 2015. We will run a two days tutorial in Toulouse, Oct 6-7 2014. Contact us for … Continue reading Sept 7, 2014, Strasbourg, FR
The old function valid() has been superseded by the perf() function. The update of the website is on its way, in the meantime, please download the following file: Running_perf_function4.
The major changes of this new update is the perf() function that supersedes valid() and offers a variable stability measure across the different folds. The pls() and spls() functions have been modified and are now following the same framework coding. See the CRAN page here. The mixOmics website will be updated … Continue reading mixOmics 5.0-2 update
ECCB Tutorial T04. Multivariate methodologies for the exploration of large biological data sets. Application in R using the mixOmics package Date: Sunday Sept 7, 2014 Venue: FORUM building, Faculté de Médecine, 4, rue Kirschleger, Strasbourg Time: 9am – 5.30pm (registration starts from 8am) Contact: mixomics[at]math.univ-toulouse.fr More details: http://www.eccb14.org/program/tutorials/mixomics How to register: … Continue reading ECCB’14 Tutorial on mixOmics
Another presentation of mixOmics dating Sept 2013, which presents the latest developments including time course data, multi-group and multi-block analysis. Go here.
Changes in 4.1 ================ New features: ————- – New S3 method valid for objects of class psl, spls, plsda and splsda – New select.var function to directly extract the selected variables from spls, spca, sipca – New data set vac18 for multilevel data
Our manuscript ‘Insightful graphicalt outputs to explore relationships between two “omics” data sets has been published and explains how to interpret Correlation Circle plots, how relevance networks and CIM are generated from rCCA and sPLS. Check this very colourful manuscript[intlink id=”202″ type=”page”]here[/intlink]!
Another general presentation of mixOmics dating Dec 2012, which presents some preliminary but exciting results about time course data and the generalisation of PLS to multi block data sets using the approach of our collaborator Arthur Tenenhaus and colleagues. Go[intlink id=”202″ type=”page”]here[/intlink].
A new general presentation about mixOmics is available (and should be updated for major update of the package) in the [intlink id=”204″ type=”page”]Presentation Section[/intlink]. Lê Cao K.-A. Unravelling `omics’ data with the mixOmics R package, Illustration on several studies. General presentation on mixOmics (last updated 05/04/2012) [Presentation]
Independent Principal Component Analysis (IPCA) In some case studies, we have identified some limitations when using PCA: PCA assumes that gene expression follows a multivariate normal distribution and recent studies have demonstrated that microarray gene expression measurements follow instead a super-Gaussian distribution PCA decomposes the data based on the maximization … Continue reading (s)IPCA
A multilevel approach has been added for cross-over design experiments (up to two cross factors), in collaboration with A/Prof B. Liquet (Universite de Bordeaux, France). This approach takes into account the complex structure of repeated measurements from different assays, where different treatments are applied on the same subjects to highlight the treatment effects within … Continue reading New methods: multilevel analyses
R package and Methods: IPCA and sparse IPCA functions have been implemented (as well as their associated S3 functions). IPCA stands for Principal Component Analysis with Independent Loadings. It is a combination of the advantages of both PCA and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). PCA is a powerful exploratory tool if … Continue reading Web-interface
New S3 method network and cim for results from PLS model New code for the valid function to PLS-DA and SPLS-DA models validation The S3 method plot.valid was modified to display graphical results from valid function for PLS-DA and SPLS-DA models cim and network functions were modified to obtain the similarity matrix in return value The … Continue reading New Graphics: network & cim
New function pca and spca are now available to perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and sparse PCA for variable selection The S3 methods plotVar, plot3dVar, plotIndiv, plot3dIndiv were modified to generate graphical results for pca and spca
New function plot.valid to display the results of the valid function New code for imgCor function for a nicer representation of the correlation matrices In predict function the argument ‘method’ were replaced by method = c(“max.dist”, “class.dist”, “centroids.dist”, “mahalanobis.dist”) The arguments dendrogram, ColSideColors and RowSideColors were added to the cim function valid function can also been performed with missing values … Continue reading New function: plot.valid
plsda and splsda have been further improved so that all the S3 functions predict, print, plotIndiv, plot3dIndiv can be used with these new classes Several prediction methods are now available to predict the classes of test data with plsda andsplsda, see argument ‘method’ (max.dist, class.dist, centroids.dist, mahalanobis.dist) in thepredict function
plsda and splsda functions are implemented to perform PLS Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) and sparse PLS-DA respectively breast.tumors data set is introduced to illustrate the (s)PLS-DA PCA can also been performed with missing values using the NIPALS algorithm and 3D plots are also available for PCA Network (updated) to display relevant associations between variables for (r)CCA and … Continue reading (s)PLS-DA added
3D representation to display samples and variables for (r)CCA 3D representation to display samples and variables for (s)PLS The argument scaleY has been added to the pls and spls functions (s)PLS can also be applied when there is only 1 predictor variable
