[HN Gopher] Circos - Circular Visualization
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Circos - Circular Visualization
Author : smartmic
Score : 74 points
Date : 2024-07-09 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (circos.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (circos.ca)
| inciampati wrote:
| It's a nice visualization system when you have a lot of very long
| one-dimensional things with nonlinear relationships. This is
| super common in genomics but in principle could be applied many
| places.
|
| That said, circos plots are sort of cliche in genomics and I do
| see people tending to move away from them.
|
| It suffers from an effect of having too many things all together,
| all at once, layered in ways that sometimes make it difficult to
| compare. This is especially true when you have data tracks that
| are circularly laid out around the plot.
| aorth wrote:
| Came to say something similar. I've been installing and
| updating Circos on our HPC cluster for bioinformatics users for
| over ten years. It was really popular in the early and mid
| 2010s!
| lbeltrame wrote:
| I don't get the fad with circos plots. At least in genomics, they
| offer a high density of information but unfortunately at the
| price of hard if not impossible interpretation. Like the systems
| biology papers of old, showing beautiful dense graphs, but with
| little room for biological interpretation. In addition, circos is
| quite... peculiar as an application, in particular its quirky
| configuration file format, which is half ini like and half XML or
| HTML like. Last I looked at it, about a decade ago, there weren't
| any APIs to create plots programmatically.
| munificent wrote:
| I've seen these circular plots a number of times and I've never
| once found them to illuminate the underlying data, even a little
| bit.
| esafak wrote:
| Maybe it is because you need to become used to them? I do not
| find them informative either.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I really struggle to understand most of the diagrams on this page
| without context. I suspect it's a lot more useful if you spend
| time swapping in the overall context of a diagram, after which
| you can visually pattern match. Without context, it's just pretty
| noise to me, IMO.
| zazaulola wrote:
| These charts remind me of astrologers' natal charts.
| cedricbonhomme wrote:
| I used Circos quite a lot back in time. It's written in Perl. I
| was working on a Python visualization tool for analyzing the
| relationships between different IP, from network traffic capture:
|
| https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/IP-Link
|
| (there is a link to the documentation with some nice chord
| diagrams.) This one is quite impressive:
| https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/IP-Link/blob/master/docs/_...
| nut not easy to read !
| robbles wrote:
| Doesn't this suffer from similar issues to a pie chart?
|
| e.g. https://scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/resources/data-
| visualisation-a...
|
| I'm kinda suspicious that any data visualization that uses a
| circle is going to be hard to draw meaning from.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Just feels like an overloaded chart where you can pick out maybe
| one to two patterns that are useful, similar to a pie chart
| showing maybe one to two chunks that overwhelm.
| dangets wrote:
| These types of graphs are also possible using D3.js. The "Chord
| diagam II" example references Circos implementation -
| https://observablehq.com/@d3/chord-diagram/2?intent=fork
| diekhans wrote:
| Circos is useful when the data is sparse and quickly becomes
| extremely time-consuming to near-impossible to interpret. The
| most you can say is "wow, there is a lot going on".
|
| I know in five seconds if a Circos plot is worth looking at.
| photonthug wrote:
| The same guy apparently made https://hiveplot.com/
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(page generated 2024-07-09 23:00 UTC)