Visual Analytics of Gene Sets Comparison

During the last decades, the volume of genomic data has increased enormously, as has the complexity of related gene annotation data. As a result, there is an ever-increasing need for methods that can help biologists compare sets of genes efficiently. While several standard tools exist that support such analyses, to date there is no broadly accepted approach for the visual comparison of gene sets, and most tools generate as output flat files with lists of annotations and their associated significance scores. More advanced techniques are required by the visual analytics community to help exploration of results efficiently. Here, we report our preliminary work on adaptable, zoomable, and interactive tag-clouds as one such potential improvement.