Observation selection

One way in which the UniApp provides flexible data analysis is by allowing you to subset your data in a virtually unlimited manner. This offers great flexibility in your analysis and experimental design. This can be accomplished in the observation selection model.  Here you can subset your data set based on metadata variables. 

Additionally the observation selection modal enables you to quantify metadata.

To bring up this pivot table, click on the  Select cells button in the Cell selection tab. This is usually the first tab in the Algorithm box in most analysis modules: 

Alternatively you can also bring up the cell/sample selection pivot table by  clickin the Visualize metadata button in the Visualization box of the Experiment design module. 

1 Selecting a subset of cells

To subset you data, in the bottom left field where all metadata variables (i.e. columns) are listed, click on the downward pointing arrow to right of a metadata variable based on which you wish to perform subsetting to select a metadata observations to keep. For example in the metadata "location" we can select only "brain" and "heart" observations. This means that we will keep only the cells in the "brain" and "heart" observation of the "location" variable in our subset. Click on the Apply button to save your selection. 

Subsetting can be performed on multiple different variables at same time. We can addtionally select only cells from the "capillary", "capillary arterial" and "capillary venous" clusters of the "Cluster" variable.

In the resulting pivot table we can the current selection of cells. This selection will be used in the current analysis module. 

Selecting cells in the Data pretreatment module will perform a "hard" subset. This means that only the cells in the cell subset used in data pretreatment will be available in the downstream analyses. 

1.1 Selecting subsets of cells on the basis of a categorical variable

If you select a categorical variable, then you perform the subsetting by selecting the categories to keep / discard. For example, in the metadata "ClusterID" we can deselect all cells corresponding to clusters 6 and 7. This means that these cells will not be retained for the following visualizations / analyses. Click on the Apply button to save your selection. 

4 Video tutorial