Finding patterns in Data

Heat maps are a way to colorize, visualize, and organize a data set with the goal of intuiting relationships among observations and features.

Heat Maps

Heat map with dendrograms enable rapid visual inspection of our data. Each row can be considered as a profile of features. Colorized and ordered this way, we can spot relationships among the profiles for cars or cereals more easily.

Go to the Introductory Heat Map Activity.

Discovering Patterns in Breast Cancer Data

This image summarizes a lot of breast cancer clinical and genomic data. The first 11 rows characterize the patients' tumors. In the red and green "heat map," genes (rows) and patient tissue samples (columns) are organized to highlight patterns. Each column represents data from a single breast cancer patient.

For example, "Basal" tumors are aggressive and often have a "BRCA1" gene mutation. The remaining rows describe the expression levels of genes relative to the average expression of all genes. Red indicates elevated expression, and green indicates reduced expression.

We will create similar heatmaps in the course activities.

R Markdown File

Get the published activity here.

Biological Function of Heat Map Clusters

Get the published activity here.

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