Mad about you, orchestrally.feel the vibe, feel the terror, feel the painmore quotes

# biography · poster · CV

Martin Krzywinski
Staff Scientist, Bioinformatics
Genome Sciences Centre
BC Cancer Agency
570 W 7th Avenue
Vancouver BC V5Z 4S6

1.604.877.6000 x 673262
martink@bcgsc.ca
@mkrzywinski

# at a glance

EMBO Practical Course: Bioinformatics and Genome Analysis, 5–17 June 2017.

# Choosing, naming and clustering colors—for everyone

## Resources

### Color summarizer

The color summarizer generates statistical color summaries of images.

It reports average RGB, HSV, LAB and LCH color components as well as histograms and individual pixel values for these color spaces. Comes with useful web API for all your automation needs.

Yes! I support LCH, which is extremely useful in generating color ramps and, in general, talking about perceptual aspects of color that are intuitive.

My color summarizer reports the representative colors in an image by grouping colors into clusters of similar colors and reporting the average color in each cluster. This is useful in image identification and comparison.

The color summarizer also identifies representative colors in the image by using k-means clustering to group colors into clusters. The centers of each cluster are also reported by name, using my large database of named colors.

Below is an example of a detailed color report of an image—an adorable Fiat 126p I found while it was screaming out its color against the fading background of Havana.

My color summarizer generates statistical color summaries of images, including a poetic list of words used to describe the colors.

### Adobe Swatches for Brewer Palettes

All the Brewer palettes at a glance.

The Brewer color palettes are an excellent source for perceptually uniform color palettes. I provide Adobe Swatches for all colors in the Brewer Palettes.

I also provide a short talk to help you understand why these palettes are important.

### Color Palettes for Color Blindness

Color blindness is a thing. You should worry about it when you're designing and especially when you're encoding information.

Sets of representative hues and tones that are indistinguishable to individuals with different kinds of color blindness. The rectangle below the each color pair shows how the colors appear to someone with color blindness.

I provide some background on color blindness and give options for choosing 7-, 12- and 15-color palettes that are colorblind safe.

(left) Colors grouped by equivalence of perception in deuteranopes. Each of the two hues is represented in six different brightness and chroma combinations. (right) One of the subsets of colors on the left that are reasonably distinct in both deuteranopia and protanopia. To tritanopes, three of the pairs are difficult to distinguish.

### List of Named Colors

Probably the world's largest list of named colors.

With more than 8,300 colors, even a mantis shrimp would be impressed. You can finally imagine a color you can't even imagine and name it!

Use my list of named colors to name the colors in the Google logo: dodger blue, cinnabar, amber and medium emerland green.

The color name list is hooked into the color summarizer's clustering. You can get a list of words, derived from the color names, that describes an image.

The color summarizer returns words that qualitatively describe the image.

### color proportions in country flags

A visual survey of the color proportions in flags of 256 countries.

(right) 256 country flags as concentric circles showing the proportions of each color in the flag. (left) Unique flags sorted by similarity.

Flags are depicted by concentric rings whose thickness is a function of the amount of that color in the flag.

I make the flag color catalog available, as well as similarity scores based on color proportions for each flag pair, so you can run your own analysis.

VIEW ALL

# Classification and regression trees

Fri 28-07-2017
Decision trees are a powerful but simple prediction method.

Decision trees classify data by splitting it along the predictor axes into partitions with homogeneous values of the dependent variable. Unlike logistic or linear regression, CART does not develop a prediction equation. Instead, data are predicted by a series of binary decisions based on the boundaries of the splits. Decision trees are very effective and the resulting rules are readily interpreted.

Trees can be built using different metrics that measure how well the splits divide up the data classes: Gini index, entropy or misclassification error.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Classification and decision trees. (read)

When the predictor variable is quantitative and not categorical, regression trees are used. Here, the data are still split but now the predictor variable is estimated by the average within the split boundaries. Tree growth can be controlled using the complexity parameter, a measure of the relative improvement of each new split.

Individual trees can be very sensitive to minor changes in the data and even better prediction can be achieved by exploiting this variability. Using ensemble methods, we can grow multiple trees from the same data.

Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2017) Points of Significance: Classification and regression trees. Nature Methods 14:757–758.

Lever, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2016) Points of Significance: Logistic regression. Nature Methods 13:541-542.

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2015) Points of Significance: Multiple Linear Regression Nature Methods 12:1103-1104.

Lever, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2016) Points of Significance: Classifier evaluation. Nature Methods 13:603-604.

Lever, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2016) Points of Significance: Model Selection and Overfitting. Nature Methods 13:703-704.

Lever, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2016) Points of Significance: Regularization. Nature Methods 13:803-804.

# Personal Oncogenomics Program 5 Year Anniversary Art

Wed 26-07-2017

The artwork was created in collaboration with my colleagues at the Genome Sciences Center to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG).

5 Years of Personalized Oncogenomics Program at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The poster shows 545 cancer cases. (left) Cases ordered chronologically by case number. (right) Cases grouped by diagnosis (tissue type) and then by similarity within group.

The Personal Oncogenomics Program (POG) is a collaborative research study including many BC Cancer Agency oncologists, pathologists and other clinicians along with Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre with support from BC Cancer Foundation.

The aim of the program is to sequence, analyze and compare the genome of each patient's cancer—the entire DNA and RNA inside tumor cells— in order to understand what is enabling it to identify less toxic and more effective treatment options.

# Principal component analysis

Thu 06-07-2017
PCA helps you interpret your data, but it will not always find the important patterns.

Principal component analysis (PCA) simplifies the complexity in high-dimensional data by reducing its number of dimensions.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Principal component analysis. (read)

To retain trend and patterns in the reduced representation, PCA finds linear combinations of canonical dimensions that maximize the variance of the projection of the data.

PCA is helpful in visualizing high-dimensional data and scatter plots based on 2-dimensional PCA can reveal clusters.

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2017) Points of Significance: Principal component analysis. Nature Methods 14:641–642.

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2017) Points of Significance: Clustering. Nature Methods 14:545–546.

# $k$ index: a weightlighting and Crossfit performance measure

Wed 07-06-2017

Similar to the $h$ index in publishing, the $k$ index is a measure of fitness performance.

To achieve a $k$ index for a movement you must perform $k$ unbroken reps at $k$% 1RM.

The expected value for the $k$ index is probably somewhere in the range of $k = 26$ to $k=35$, with higher values progressively more difficult to achieve.

In my $k$ index introduction article I provide detailed explanation, rep scheme table and WOD example.

# Dark Matter of the English Language—the unwords

Wed 07-06-2017

I've applied the char-rnn recurrent neural network to generate new words, names of drugs and countries.

The effect is intriguing and facetious—yes, those are real words.

But these are not: necronology, abobionalism, gabdologist, and nonerify.

These places only exist in the mind: Conchar and Pobacia, Hzuuland, New Kain, Rabibus and Megee Islands, Sentip and Sitina, Sinistan and Urzenia.

And these are the imaginary afflictions of the imagination: ictophobia, myconomascophobia, and talmatomania.

And these, of the body: ophalosis, icabulosis, mediatopathy and bellotalgia.

Want to name your baby? Or someone else's baby? Try Ginavietta Xilly Anganelel or Ferandulde Hommanloco Kictortick.

When taking new therapeutics, never mix salivac and labromine. And don't forget that abadarone is best taken on an empty stomach.

And nothing increases the chance of getting that grant funded than proposing the study of a new –ome! We really need someone to looking into the femome and manome.