The U-CIE color tool: Encoding high-dimensional data as colors for use in data visualization
Channel: Lars Juhl Jensen
Date: 31/01/2022

A brief introduction to the U-CIE color tool (https://u-cie.jensenlab.org/), which allows you to encode single-cell RNA-seq, metagenomic microbiome, or any other type high-dimensional data as colors. The presentation explains the the simple idea behind the tool and how data are turned into colors through two steps, namely UMAP dimensionality reduction and fitting the resulting point cloud into the CIELAB color space.

0:00 Introduction: omics data visualization on networks and the problem of high-dimensional data from e.g. single-cell RNA-seq or metagenomics studies
0:42 Simple idea: reduce high-dimensional data to 3D and then map to colors
1:20 Two-step method: dimensionality reduction, UMAP, perceptual uniform color space, CIELAB, and optimal fitting of data points to colors
2:29 Use case: Tara Oceans, microbiome composition, color encoding on world map, and interpretable colors on scatter plot
3:58 Availability: the U-CIE web resource and R package

U-CIE is available at https://u-cie.jensenlab.org/

To learn more about U-CIE watch the presentation by Mikaela Koutroulli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6KgC5KJ-3g) or read the preprint (https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.02.470966).