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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

5 Way Venn diagram, with Paths

I was looking for a way to clean up my 5-way Venn diagrams (aka, remove the spaces with zeros) when I discovered you can do some pretty amazing things in Inkscape once you convert your objects to paths.

Since I plan to use this as a figure, I've removed the relevant numbers, but left the shapes - I think it's pretty obvious right away how the relationships work, which isn't bad, considering it IS a 5-way venn diagram.

Pretty, isn't it?



As I mentioned above, the image was made in Inkscape (available for windows/linux/mac). The software natively produces scalable vector graphics, which can be exported to png. Despite the complexity of the image, it really doesn't take long to do this, and Inkscape is pretty easy, once you get the hang of it.

Anyhow, while it's not immediately clear how to interpret the figure, it's still an interesting representation of data that would otherwise be totally impossible to interpret with the naked eye.

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4 Comments:

Blogger Will said...

You may have seen this, but this rabbit hole runs deeper than you'd think...

http://www.combinatorics.org/Surveys/ds5/VennGraphEJC.html

Check out the 7 region venn at the top of the page. Beautiful, but only questionably useful for visualizing data.

October 22, 2009 10:51:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Anthony Fejes said...

That's cool, I hadn't seen the 7-ways... and now that I have, I'm not sure I ever want to again!

Ironically, after posting my comment that my 5-way might be hard to understand, I realized that it's intuitively simple to understand when it's side by side as a before/after pair. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait for the publication to see how that works. Soon, hopefully. (=

October 22, 2009 10:55:00 AM PDT  
Anonymous ilanio said...

Hi there, do you know if there is any online program that can compare 5 different lists of genes and give me a 5 ways Venn diagram? cheers

March 2, 2010 10:15:00 AM PST  
Blogger Anthony Fejes said...

Off hand, I'm not aware of any applications that do that. The only tools I have for crossing gene lists are ones that I wrote myself, and I'm not sure how useful they'd be without documentation.

I'm also not aware of any software that makes venn diagrams more complex than 3-way, anyhow.

I do all my illustrations in Inkscape.

March 2, 2010 10:46:00 AM PST  

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