# A plot of genes on chromosomes

Marta Cifuentes and Wayne Crismani asked on Twitter if there is a web tool similar to the Arabidopsis Chromosome Map Tool that makes figures of genes on chromosomes for humans. This will not really be an answer to the question — not a web tool, not conveniently packaged — but I thought that would be a nice plot to make in R with ggplot2. We will use the ggrepel package to help with labelling, and get information from the Ensembl REST API with httr and jsonlite.

# The plot and the final code to generate it

Below I will go through the functions that get us there, but here is the end product. The code is on GitHub as usual.

## Some Ensembl genes to test with

ensembl_genes <- c("ENSG00000125845", ## BMP2
"ENSG00000181690", ## PLAG1
"ENSG00000177508", ## IRX3
"ENSG00000140718") ## FTO

chr_sizes <- get_chromosome_sizes_from_ensembl(species = "homo_sapiens")

coords <- get_coordinates_from_ensembl(ensembl_genes)

plot_genes_test <- plot_genes(coords,
chr_sizes)


We will use Ensembl and access the genes via Ensembl Gene IDs. Here, I’ve looked up the Ensembl Gene IDs for four genes I like (in humans).

We need to know how long human chromosomes are in order to plot them, so we have a function for that; we also need to get coordinates for the genes, and we have a function for that. They are both below. These functions call up the Ensembl REST API to get the data from the Ensembl database.

Finally, there is a plotting function that takes the coordinates and the chromosome sizes as input and return a ggplot2 plot.

# Getting the data out of the Ensembl REST API

Now, starting from the top, we will need to define those functions to interact with the Ensembl REST API. This marvellous machine allows us to get data out of the Ensembl database over HTTP, writing our questions in the URL. It is nicely described with examples from multiple languages on the Ensembl REST API website.

An alternative to using the REST API would be to download gene locations from BioMart. This was my first thought. BioMart is more familiar to me than the REST API, and it also has the nice benefit that it is easy to download every gene and store it away for the future. However, there isn’t a nice way to get chromosome lengths from BioMart, so we would have to download them from somewhere else. This is isn’t hard, but I thought using the REST API for both tasks seemed nicer.

## Plot showing the location of a few genomes on chromosomes

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggrepel)
library(purrr)

## Get an endpoint from the Ensembl REST api and return parsed JSON

get_from_rest_api <- function(endpoint_string,
server = "https://rest.ensembl.org/") {
rest <- GET(paste(server, endpoint_string, sep = ""),
content_type("application/json"))

stop_for_status(rest)

fromJSON(toJSON(content(rest)))
}


This first function gets content by sending a request, checking whether it worked (and stopping with an error if it didn’t), and then unpacking the content into an R object.

## Get chromosomes sizes from the Ensembl REST API

get_chromosome_sizes_from_ensembl <- function(species) {

json <- get_from_rest_api(paste("info/assembly/", species, sep = ""))

data.frame(name = as.character(json$top_level_region$name),
length = as.numeric(json$top_level_region$length),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
}


This second function asks for the genome assembly information for a particular species with the GET info/assembly/:species endpoint, and extracts the chromosome lengths into a data frame. The first part of data gathering is done, now we just need the coordinates fort the genes of interest.

## Get coordinates from Ensembl ids

get_coordinates_from_ensembl <- function(ensembl_ids) {

map_dfr(ensembl_ids,
function(ei) {
json <- get_from_rest_api(paste("lookup/id/", ei, sep = ""))

data.frame(position = (json$start + json$end)/2,
chr = json$seq_region_name, display_name = json$display_name,
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
})
}


This function asks for the gene information for each gene ID we’ve given it with the GET lookup/id/:id endpoint, and extracts the rough position (mean of start and end coordinate), chromosome name, and the ”display name”, which in the human case will be a gene symbol. (For genes that don’t have a gene symbol, we would need to set up this column ourselves.)

At this point, we have the data we need in two data frames. That means it’s time to make the plot.

# Plotting code

We will build a plot with two layers: first the chromosomes (as a geom_linerange) and then the gene locations (as a geom_text_repel from the ggrepel package). The text layer will move the labels around so that they don’t overlap even when the genes are close to each other, and by setting the nudge_x argument we can move them to the side of the chromosomes.

Apart from that, we change the scale to set he order of chromosomes and reverse the scale of the y-axis so that chromosomes start at the top of the plot.

The function returns a ggplot2 plot object, so one can do some further customisation after the fact — but for some features one would have to re-write things inside the function.

plot_genes <- function(coordinates,
chromosome_sizes) {

## Restrict to chromosomes that are in data
chrs_in_data <-
chromosome_sizes[chromosome_sizes$name %in% coordinates$chr,]
chr_order <- order(as.numeric(chrs_in_data$name)) ggplot() + geom_linerange(aes(x = name, ymin = 1, ymax = length/1e6), size = 2, colour = "grey", data = chrs_in_data) + geom_text_repel(aes(x = chr, y = position/1e6, label = display_name), nudge_x = 0.33, data = coordinates) + scale_y_reverse() + ## Fix ordering of chromosomes on x-axis scale_x_discrete(limits = chrs_in_data$name[chr_order],
labels = chrs_in_data$name[chr_order]) + theme_bw() + theme(panel.grid = element_blank()) + xlab("Chromosome") + ylab("Position (Mbp)") }  # Possible extensions One feature from the Arabidopsis inspiration that is missing here is the position of centromeres. We should be able to use the option ?bands=1 in the GET info/assembly/:species to get cytogenetic band information and separate p and q arms of chromosomes. This will not be universal though, i.e. not available for most species I care about. Except to make cartoons of gene positions, I think this might be a nice way to make plots of genome regions with very course resolution, i.e. linkage mapping results, where one could add lines to show genomic confidence intervals, for example. # Convincing myself about the Monty Hall problem Like many others, I’ve never felt that the solution to the Monty Hall problem was intuitive, despite the fact that explanations of the correct solution are everywhere. I am not alone. Famously, columnist Marilyn vos Savant got droves of mail from people trying to school her after she had published the correct solution. The problem goes like this: You are a contestant on a game show (based on a real game show hosted by Monty Hall, hence the name). The host presents you with three doors, one of which contains a prize — say, a goat — and the others are empty. After you’ve made your choice, the host opens one of the doors, showing that it is empty. You are now asked whether you would like to stick to your initial choice, or switch to the other door. The right thing to do is to switch, which gives you 2/3 probability of winning the goat. This can be demonstrated in a few different ways. A goat is a great prize. Image: Casey Goat by Pete Markham (CC BY-SA 2.0) So I sat down to do 20 physical Monty Hall simulations on paper. I shuffled three cards with the options, picked one, and then, playing the role of the host, took away one losing option, and noted down if switching or holding on to the first choice would have been the right thing to do. The results came out 13 out of 20 (65%) wins for the switching strategy, and 7 out of 20 (35%) for the holding strategy. Of course, the Monty Hall Truthers out there must question whether this demonstration in fact happened — it’s too perfect, isn’t it? The outcome of the simulation is less important than the feeling that came over me as I was running it, though. As I was taking on the role of the host and preparing to take away one of the losing options, it started feeling self-evident that the important thing is whether the first choice is right. If the first choice is right, holding is the right strategy. If the first choice is wrong, switching is the right option. And the first choice, clearly, is only right 1/3 of the time. In this case, it was helpful to take the game show host’s perspective. Selvin (1975) discussed the solution to the problem in The American Statistician, and included a quote from Monty Hall himself: Monty Hall wrote and expressed that he was not ”a student of statistics problems” but ”the big hole in your argument is that once the first box is seen to be empty, the contestant cannot exchange his box.” He continues to say, ”Oh, and incidentally, after one [box] is seen to be empty, his chances are no longer 50/50 but remain what they were in the first place, one out of three. It just seems to the contestant that one box having been eliminated, he stands a better chance. Not so.” I could not have said it better myself. # A generalised problem Now, imagine the same problem with a number d number of doors, w number of prizes and o number of losing doors that are opened after the first choice is made. We assume that the losing doors are opened at random, and that switching entails picking one of the remaining doors at random. What is the probability of winning with the switching strategy? The probability of picking the a door with or without a prize is: $\Pr(\text{pick right first}) = \frac{w}{d}$ $\Pr(\text{pick wrong first}) = 1 - \frac{w}{d}$ If we picked a right door first, we have w – 1 winning options left out of d – o – 1 doors after the host opens o doors: $\Pr(\text{win\textbar right first}) = \frac{w - 1}{d - o - 1}$ If we picked the wrong door first, we have all the winning options left: $\Pr(\text{win\textbar wrong first}) = \frac{w}{d - o - 1}$ Putting it all together: $\Pr(\text{win\textbar switch}) = \Pr(\text{pick right first}) \cdot \Pr(\text{win\textbar right first}) + \\ + \Pr(\text{pick wrong first}) \cdot \Pr(\text{win\textbar wrong first}) = \\ = \frac{w}{d} \frac{w - 1}{d - o - 1} + (1 - \frac{w}{d}) \frac{w}{d - o - 1}$ As before, for the hold strategy, the probability of winning is the probability of getting it right the first time: $\Pr(\text{win\textbar hold}) = \frac{w}{d}$ With the original Monty Hall problem, w = 1, d = 3 and o = 1, and therefore $\Pr(\text{win\textbar switch}) = \frac{1}{3} \cdot 0 + \frac{2}{3} \cdot 1$ Selvin (1975) also present a generalisation due to Ferguson, where there are n options and p doors that are opened after the choice. That is, w = 1, d = 3 and o = 1. Therefore, $\Pr(\text{win\textbar switch}) = \frac{1}{n} \cdot 0 + (1 - \frac{1}{n}) \frac{1}{n - p - 1} = \frac{n - 1}{n(n - p - 1)}$ which is Ferguson’s formula. Finally, in Marilyn vos Savant’s column, she used this thought experiment to illustrate why switching is the right thing to do: Here’s a good way to visualize what happened. Suppose there are a million doors, and you pick door #1. Then the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens them all except door #777,777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you? That is, w = 1 still, d = 106 and o = 106 – 2. $\Pr(\text{win\textbar switch}) = 1 - \frac{1}{10^6}$ It turns out that the solution to the generalised problem is that it is always better to switch, as long as there is a prize, and as long as the host opens any doors. One can also generalise it to choosing sets of more than one door. This makes some intuitive sense: as long as the host takes opens some doors, taking away losing options, switching should enrich for prizes. # Some code To be frank, I’m not sure I have convinced myself of the solution to the generalised problem yet. However, using the code below, I did try the calculation for all combinations of total number of doors, prizes and doors opened up to 100, and in all cases, switching wins. That inspires some confidence, should I end up on a small ruminant game show. The code below first defines a wrapper around R’s sampling function, which has a very annoying alternative behaviour when fed a vector of length one, to be able to build a computational version of my physical simulation. Finally, we have a function for the above formulae. (See whole thing on GitHub if you are interested.) ## Wrap sample into a function that avoids the "convenience" ## behaviour that happens when the length of x is one sample_safer <- function(to_sample, n) { assert_that(n <= length(to_sample)) if (length(to_sample) == 1) return(to_sample) else { return(sample(to_sample, n)) } } ## Simulate a generalised Monty Hall situation with ## w prizes, d doors and o doors that are opened. sim_choice <- function(w, d, o) { ## There has to be less prizes than unopened doors assert_that(w < d - o) wins <- rep(1, w) losses <- rep(0, d - w) doors <- c(wins, losses) ## Pick a door choice <- sample_safer(1:d, 1) ## Doors that can be opened to_open_from <- which(doors == 0) ## Chosen door can't be opened to_open_from <- to_open_from[to_open_from != choice] ## Doors to open to_open <- sample_safer(to_open_from, o) ## Switch to one of the remaining doors possible_switches <- setdiff(1:d, c(to_open, choice)) choice_after_switch <- sample_safer(possible_switches , 1) result_hold <- doors[choice] result_switch <- doors[choice_after_switch] c(result_hold, result_switch) } ## Formulas for probabilities mh_formula <- function(w, d, o) { ## There has to be less prizes than unopened doors assert_that(w < d - o) p_win_switch <- w/d * (w - 1)/(d - o - 1) + (1 - w/d) * w / (d - o - 1) p_win_hold <- w/d c(p_win_hold, p_win_switch) } ## Standard Monty Hall mh <- replicate(1000, sim_choice(1, 3, 1))  > mh_formula(1, 3, 1) [1] 0.3333333 0.6666667 > rowSums(mh)/ncol(mh) [1] 0.347 0.653 # The Monty Hall problem problem Guest & Martin (2020) use this simple problem as their illustration for computational model building: two 12 inch pizzas for the same price as one 18 inch pizza is not a good deal, because the 18 inch pizza contains more food. Apparently this is counter-intuitive to many people who have intuitions about inches and pizzas. They call the risk of having inconsistencies in our scientific understanding because we cannot intuitively grasp the implications of our models ”The pizza problem”, arguing that it can be ameliorated by computational modelling, which forces you to spell out implicit assumptions and also makes you actually run the numbers. Having a formal model of areas of circles doesn’t help much, unless you plug in the numbers. The Monty Hall problem problem is the pizza problem with a vengeance; not only is it hard to intuitively grasp what is going on in the problem, but even when presented with compelling evidence, the mental resistance might still remain and lead people to write angry letters and tweets. Literature Guest, O, & Martin, AE (2020). How computational modeling can force theory building in psychological science. Preprint. Selvin, S (1975) On the Monty Hall problem. The American Statistician 29:3 p.134. # Shell stuff I didn’t know I generally stay away from doing anything more complicated in a shell script than making a directory and running an R script or a single binary, and especially avoid awk and sed as much as possible. However, sometimes the shell actually does offer a certain elegance and convenience (and sometimes deceitful traps). Here are three things I only learned recently: # Stripping directory and suffix from file names Imagine we have a project where files are named with the sample ID followed by some extension, like so: project/data/sample1.g.vcf project/data/sample2.g.vcf project/data/sample3.g.vcf Quite often, we will want to grab all the in a directory and extract the base name without extension and without the whole path leading up to the file. There is a shell command for this called basename: basename -s .g.vcf project/data/sample*.g.vcf sample1 sample2 sample3 The -s flag gives the suffix to remove. This is much nicer than trying to regexp it, for example with R: library(stringr) files <- dir("project/data") basename <- str_match(files, "^.*/(.+)\\.g\\.vcf")  Look at that second argument … ”^.*/(.+)\\.g\\.vcf” What is this?! And let me tell you, that was not my first attempt at writing that regexp either. Those of us who can interpret this gibberish must acknowledge that we have learned to do so only through years of suffering. For that matter, it’s also than the bash suffix and prefix deletion syntax, which is one of those things I think one has to google every time. for string in project/data/*.g.vcf; do nosuffix=${string%.g.vcf}
noprefix=${nosuffix#project/data/} echo$noprefix
done


# Logging both standard out and standard error

When sending jobs off to a server to be run without you looking at them, it’s often convenient to save the output to a file. To redirect standard output to a file, use ”>”, like so:

./script_that_prints_output.sh > out_log.txt


However, there is also another output stream used to record (among other things) error messages (in some programs; this isn’t very consistent). Therefore, we should probably log the standard error stream too. To redirect standard error to a file:

./script_that_prints_output.sh 2> error_log.txt


And to redirect both to the same file:

./script_that_prints_output.sh > combined_log.txt 2>&1


The last bit is telling the shell to redirect the standard error stream to standard out, and then both of them get captured in the file. I didn’t know until recently that one could do this.

The above code contained some dots, and speaking of that, here is a deceitful shell trap to trip up the novice:

# The dot command (oh my, this is so bad)

When working on a certain computer system, there is a magic invocation that needs to be in the script to be able to use the module system. It should look like this:

. /etc/profile.d/modules.sh


That means ”source the script found at /etc/profiles.d/modules.sh” — which will activate the module system for you.

It should not look like this:

./etc/profile.d/modules.sh

bash: ./etc/profile.d/modules.sh: No such file or directory


That means that bash tries to find a file called ”etc/profile.d/modules.sh” located in the current directory — which (probably) doesn’t exist.

If there is a space after the dot, it is a command that means the same as source, i.e. run a script from a file. If there is no space after the dot, it means a relative file path — also often used to run a script. I had never actually thought about it until someone took away the space before the dot, and got the above error message (plus something else more confusing, because a module was missing).

# My talk at the ChickenStress Genomics and Bioinformatics Workshop

A few months ago I gave a talk at the ChickenStress Genomics and Bioinformatics Workshop about genetic mapping of traits and gene expression.

ChickenStress is a European training network of researchers who study stress in chickens, as you might expect. It brings together people who work with (according to the work package names) environmental factors, early life experiences and genetics. The network is centered on a group of projects by early stage researchers — by the way, I think that’s a really good way to describe the work of a PhD student — and organises activities like this workshop.

I was asked to talk about our work from my PhD on gene expression and behaviour in the chicken (Johnsson & al. 2018, Johnsson & al. 2016), concentrating on concepts and methods rather than results. If I have any recurring readers, they will already know that brief is exactly what I like to do. I talked about the basis of genetic mapping of traits and gene expression, what data one needs to do it, and gave a quick demo for a flavour of an analysis workflow (linear mixed model genome-wide association in GEMMA).

Here are slides, and the git repository of the demo:

# Using R: setting a colour scheme in ggplot2

Note to self: How to quickly set a colour scheme in ggplot2.

Imagine we have a series of plots that all need a uniform colour scale. The same category needs to have the same colour in all graphics, made possibly with different packages and by different people. Instead of hard-coding the colours and the order of categories, we can put them in a file, like so:

library(readr)

# A tibble: 5 x 2
name   colour

1 blue   #d4b9da
2 red    #c994c7
3 purple #df65b0
4 green  #dd1c77
5 orange #980043

Now a plot with default colours, using some made-up data:

x <- 1:100

beta <- rnorm(5, 1, 0.5)

stroop <- data.frame(x,
sapply(beta, function(b) x * b + rnorm(100, 1, 10)))
colnames(stroop)[2:6] <- c("orange", "blue", "red", "purple", "green")

data_long <- pivot_longer(stroop, -x)

plot_y <- qplot(x = x,
y = value,
colour = name,
data = data_long) +
theme_minimal() +
theme(panel.grid = element_blank())


Now we can add the custom scale like this:

plot_y_colours <- plot_y +
scale_colour_manual(limits = colours$name, values = colours$colour)



# Using R: simple Gantt chart with ggplot2

Jeremy Yoder’s code for a simple Gantt chart on the Molecular Ecologist blog uses geom_line and gather to prepare the data structure. I like using geom_linerange and a coord_flip, which lets you use start and end columns directly without pivoting.

Here is a very serious data frame of activities:

# A tibble: 6 x 4
activity       category        start               end

1 Clean house    preparations    2020-07-01 00:00:00 2020-07-03 00:00:00
2 Pack bags      preparations    2020-07-05 10:00:00 2020-07-05 17:00:00
3 Run to train   travel          2020-07-05 17:00:00 2020-07-05 17:15:00
4 Sleep on train travel          2020-07-05 17:15:00 2020-07-06 08:00:00
5 Procrastinate  procrastination 2020-07-01 00:00:00 2020-07-05 00:00:00
6 Sleep          vacation        2020-07-06 08:00:00 2020-07-09 00:00:00


And here is the code:


library(ggplot2)

## Set factor level to order the activities on the plot
activities$activity <- factor(activities$activity,
levels = activities$activity[nrow(activities):1]) plot_gantt <- qplot(ymin = start, ymax = end, x = activity, colour = category, geom = "linerange", data = activities, size = I(5)) + scale_colour_manual(values = c("black", "grey", "purple", "yellow")) + coord_flip() + theme_bw() + theme(panel.grid = element_blank()) + xlab("") + ylab("") + ggtitle("Vacation planning")  # Using R: 10 years with R Yesterday, 29 Feburary 2020, was the 20th anniversary of the release R 1.0.0. Jozef Hajnala’s blog has a cute anniversary post with some trivia. I realised that it is also (not to the day, but to the year) my R anniversary. I started using R in 2010, during my MSc project in Linköping. Daniel Nätt, who was a PhD student there at the time, was using it for gene expression and DNA methylation work. I think that was the reason he was pulled into R; he needed the Bioconductor packages for microarrays. He introduced me. Thanks, Daniel! I think I must first have used it to do something with qPCR melting curves. I remember that I wrote some function to reshape/pivot data between long and wide format. It was probably an atrocity of nested loops and hard bracket indexing. Coming right from an undergraduate programme with courses using Ada and C++, even if we had also used Minitab for statistics and Matlab for engineering, I spoke R with a strong accent. At any rate, I was primed to think that doing my data analysis with code was a good idea, and jumped at the opportunity to learn a tool for it. Thanks, undergraduate programme! I think the easiest thing to love about R is the package system. You can certainly end up in dependency hell with R and metaphorically shoot your own foot, especially on a shared high performance computing system. But I wouldn’t run into any of that until after several years. I was, and still am, impressed by how packages just worked, and could do almost anything. So, the Bioconductor packages were probably, indirectly, why I was introduced to R, and after that, my R story can be told in a series of packages. Thanks, CRAN! The next package was R/qtl, that I relied on for my PhD. I had my own copy of the R/qtl book. For a period, I probably wrote thing every day: library(qtl) cross <- read.cross(file = "F8_geno_trim.csv", format = "csv")  R/qtl is one of my favourite pieces or research software, relatively friendly and with lots of documentation. Thanks, R/qtl developers! Of course it was Dom Wright, who was my PhD supervisor, who introduced me to R/qtl, and I think it was also he who introduced me to ggplot2. At least he used it, and at some point we were together trying to fix the formatting of a graph, probably with some ugly hack. I decided to use ggplot2 as much as possible, and as it is wont to, ggplot2 made me care about rearranging data, thus leading to reshape2 and plyr. ”The magic is not in plotting the data but in tidying and rearranging the data for plotting.” After a while, most everything I wrote used the ddply function in some way. Thank you, Hadley Wickham! Then came the contemporary tidyverse. For the longest time, I was uneasy with tidyr, and I’m still not a regular purrr user, but one can’t avoid loving dplyr. How much? My talk at the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop in 2016 had a slide expressing my love of the filter function. It did not receive the cheers that the function deserves. Maybe the audience were Python users. With new file reading functions, new data frames and functions to manipulate data frames, modern R has become smoother and friendlier. Thanks, tidyverse developers! The history of R on this blog started in 2011, originally as a way to make notes for myself or, ”a fellow user who’s trying to google his or her way to a solution”. This turned into a series of things to help teach R to biologists around me. There was the Slightly different introduction to R series of blog posts. It used packages that feel somewhat outdated, and today, I don’t think there’s anything even slightly different about advocating RStudio, and teaching ggplot2 from the beginning. This spawned a couple of seminars in course for PhD students, which were updated for the Wright lab computation lunches, and eventually turned into a course of its own given in 2017. It would be fun to update it and give it again. The last few years, I’ve been using R for reasonably large genome datasets in a HPC environment, and gotten back to the beginnings, I guess, by using Bioconducor a lot more. However, the package that I think epitomises the last years of my R use is AlphaSimR, developed by colleagues in Edinburgh. It’s great to be able throw together a quick simulation to check how some feature of genetics behaves. AlphaSimR itself is also an example of how far the R/C++ integration has come with RCpp and RCppArmadillo. Thanks, Chris! In summary, R is my tool of choice for almost anything. I hope we’ll still be using it, in new and interesting ways, in another ten years. Thank you, R core team! # Using R: from plyr to purrr, part 0 out of however many This post is me thinking out loud about applying functions to vectors or lists and getting data frames back. Using R is an ongoing process of finding nice ways to throw data frames, lists and model objects around. While tidyr has arrived at a comfortable way to reshape dataframes with pivot_longer and pivot_wider, I don’t always find the replacements for the good old plyr package as satisfying. Here is an example of something I used to like to do with plyr. Don’t laugh! Assume we have a number of text files, all in the same format, that we need to read and combine. This arises naturally if you run some kind of analysis where the dataset gets split into chunks, like in genetics, where chunks might be chromosomes. ## Generate vector of file names files <- paste("data/chromosome", 1:20, ".txt", sep = "") library(plyr) library(readr) genome <- ldply(files, read_tsv)  This gives us one big data frame, containing the rows from all those files. If we want to move on from plyr, what are our options? We can go old school with base R functions lapply and Reduce. library(readr) chromosomes <- lapply(files, read_tsv) genome <- Reduce(rbind, chromosomes)  Here, we first let lapply read each file and store it in a list. Then we let Reduce fold the list with rbind, which binds the data frames in the list together, one below the other. If that didn’t make sense, here it is again: lapply maps a function to each element of a vector or list, collecting the results in a list. Reduce folds the elements in a list together, using a function that takes in two arguments. The first argument will be the results it’s accumulated so far, and the second argument will be the next element of the list. In the end, this leaves us, as with ldply, with one big data frame. We can also use purrr‘s map_dfr. This seems to be the contemporary most elegant solution: library(purrr) library(readr) genome <- map_dfr(files, read_tsv)  map_dfr, like good old ldply will map over a vector or list, and collect resulting data frames. The ”r” in the name means adding the next data frame as rows. There is also a ”c” version (map_dfc) for adding as columns. # Using R: Animal model with hglm and Stan (with Cholesky trick) A few weeks ago I posted about fitting the quantitative genetic animal model with MCMCglmm and R-INLA. Since then, I listened to a talk by Lars Rönnegård, one of the creators of the hglm package, and this paper was published in GSE about animal models in Stan. # hglm The hglm package fits hierarchical generalised linear models. That includes the animal model with pedigree or genomic relatedness. Hierarchical generalised linear models also allow you to model the dispersion of random effects, which lets you do tricks like variance QTL mapping (Rönnegård & Valdar 2011), breeding values for variances (Rönnegård et al. 2010) or genomic prediction models with predictors of marker variance (Mouresan, Selle & Rönnegård 2019). But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. How do we fit an animal model? Here is the matrix formulation of the animal model that we skim through in every paper. It’s in this post because we will use the design matrix interface to hglm, which needs us to give it these matrices (this is not a paper, so we’re not legally obliged to include it): $\mathbf{y} = \mu + \mathbf{X} \mathbf{b} + \mathbf{Z} \mathbf{a} + \mathbf{e}$ The terms are the the trait value, intercept, fixed coefficients and their design matrix, genetic coefficients and their design matrix, and the residual. The design matrix Z will contain one row and column for each individual, with a 1 to indicate its position in the phenotype table and pedigree and the rest zeros. If we sort our files, it’s an identity matrix. The trick with the genetic coefficients is that they’re correlated, with a specific known correlation structure that we know from the pedigree (or in genomic models, from markers). It turns out (Lee, Nelder & Pawitan 2017, chapter 8) that you can change the Z matrix around so that it lets you fit the model with an identity covariance matrix, while still accounting for the correlations between relatives. You replace the random effects for relatedness with some transformed random effects that capture the same structure. One way to do this is with Cholesky decomposition. $\mathbf{Z_{fudged}} = \mathbf{Z_0} \mathbf{L}$ As an example of what the Cholesky decomposition does, here is slice of the additive relationship matrix of 100 simulated individuals (the last generation of one replicate of these simulations) and the resulting matrix from Cholesky decomposition. So instead of $\mathbf{a} \sim N(0, \mathbf{A} \sigma)$ We can fit $\mathbf{a_{fudged}} \sim N(0, \mathbf{I} \sigma)$ This lets us fit the animal model with hglm, by putting in a modified Z matrix. Assuming we have data frames with a pedigree and a phenotype (like, again, from these simulations): library(AGHmatrix) library(hglm) A <- Amatrix(ped) Z0 <- diag(1000) L <- t(chol(A)) Z <- Z0 %*% L X <- model.matrix(~1, pheno) model <- hglm(y = pheno$pheno,
X = X,
Z = Z,
conv = 1e-8)

est_h2  <- model$varRanef / (model$varRanef + model$varFix)  (I found the recommendation to decrease the convergence criterion from the default for animal models in a YouTube video by Xia Chen.) # Stan When we turn to Stan, we will meet the Cholesky trick again. Stan is a software for Markov Chain Monte Carlo, built to fit hierarchical linear models, and related high-dimensional models, more effectively than other sampling strategies (like Gibbs). rstan is a helpful package for running Stan from within R. Nishio & Arakawa (2019) recently published a Stan script to fit an animal model, comparing Stan to a Gibbs sampler (and a related MCMC sampler that they also didn’t publish the code for). If we look into their Stan model code, they also do a Cholesky decomposition to be able to use an identity matrix for the variance. First, they decompose the additive relationship matrix that the program takes in: transformed data{ matrix[K,K] LA; LA = cholesky_decompose(A); }  And then, they express the model like this: vector[N] mu; vector[K] a; a_decompose ~ normal(0, 1); a = sigma_G * (LA * a_decompose); mu = X * b + Z * a; Y ~ normal(mu, sigma_R);  We can add this line to the generated quantities block of the Stan program to get heritability estimates directly: real h2; h2 = sigma_U / (sigma_U + sigma_E)  Here, we’ve saved their model to a stan file, and now we can run it from R: pheno$scaled_pheno <- as.vector(scale(pheno$pheno)) model_stan <- stan(file = "nishio_arakawa.stan", data = list(Y = pheno$scaled_pheno,
X = X,
A = A,
Z = Z0,
J = 1,
K = 1000,
N = 1000))

est_h2_stan <- summary(model_stan, pars = "h2")\$summary


Important note that I always forget: It's important to scale your traits before you run this model. If not, the priors might be all wrong.

The last line pulls out the summary for the heritability parameter (that we added above). This gives us an estimate and an interval.

The paper also contains this entertaining passage about performance, which reads as if it was a response to a comment, actual or anticipated:

R language is highly extensible and provides a myriad of statistical and graphical techniques. However, R language has poor computation time compared to Fortran, which is especially well suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. In the present study, we developed the programs for GS and HMC in R but did not examine computation time; instead, we focused on examining the performance of estimating genetic parameters and breeding values.

Yes, two of their samplers (Gibbs and HMC) were written in R, but the one they end up advocating (and the one used above), is in Stan. Stan code gets translated into C++ and then compiled to machine code.

# Stan with brms

If rstan lets us run Stan code from R and examine the output, brms lets us write down models in relatively straightforward R syntax. It’s like the MCMCglmm of the Stan world. We can fit an animal model with brms too, by directly plugging in the relationship matrix:

model_brms <- brm(scaled_pheno ~ 1 + (1|animal),
data = pheno,
family = gaussian(),
cov_ranef = list(animal = A),
chains = 4,
cores = 1,
iter = 2000)


Then, we can pull out the posterior samples for the variability, here expressed as standard errors, compute the heritability and then get the estimates (and interval, if we want):

posterior_brms <- posterior_samples(model_brms,
pars = c("sd_animal", "sigma"))

h2_brms  <- posterior_brms[,1]^2 /
(posterior_brms[,1]^2 + posterior_brms[,2]^2)

est_h2_brms <- mean(h2_brms)


(Code is on GitHub: both for the graphs above, and the models.)

# Using R: Installing GenABEL and RepeatABEL

GenABEL is an R package for performing genome-wide association with linear mixed models and a genomic relationship matrix. RepeatABEL is a package for such genome-wide association studies that also need repeated measures.

Unfortunately, since 2018, GenABEL is not available on CRAN anymore, because of failed checks that were not fixed. (Checks are archived on CRAN, but this means very little to me.) As a consequence, RepeatABEL is also missing.

Fair enough, the GenABEL creators probably aren’t paid to maintain old software. It is a bit tragic, however, to think that in 2016, GenABEL was supposed to be the core of a community project to develop a suite of genomic analysis packages, two years before it was taken of CRAN:

The original publication of the GenABEL package for statistical analysis of genotype data has led to the evolution of a community which we now call the GenABEL project, which brings together scientists, software developers and end users with the central goal of making statistical genomics work by openly developing and subsequently implementing statistical models into user-friendly software.

The project has benefited from an open development model, facilitating communication and code sharing between the parties involved. The use of a free software licence for the tools in the GenABEL suite promotes quick uptake and widespread dissemination of new methodologies and tools. Moreover, public access to the source code is an important ingredient for active participation by people from outside the core development team and is paramount for reproducible research. Feedback from end users is actively encouraged through a web forum, which steadily grows into a knowledge base with a multitude of answered questions. Furthermore, our open development process has resulted in transparent development of methods and software, including public code review, a large fraction of bugs being submitted by members of the community, and quick incorporation of bug fixes.

I have no special insight about the circumstances here, but obviously the situation is far from ideal. You can still use the packages, though, with a little more effort to install. Who knows how long that will be the case, though. In a complex web of dependencies like the R package ecosystem, an unmaintained package probably won’t last.

GenABEL can probably be replaced by something like GEMMA. It does mixed models for GWAS, and while it isn’t an R package, it’s probably about as convenient. However, I don’t know of a good alternative to RepeatABEL.

These are the steps to install GenABEL and RepeatABEL from archives:

1. We go to the CRAN archive and get the tarballs for GenABEL, GenABEL.data which it needs, and RepeatABEL.
curl -O https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/GenABEL/GenABEL_1.8-0.tar.gz
curl -O https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/GenABEL.data/GenABEL.data_1.0.0.tar.gz
curl -O https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/RepeatABEL/RepeatABEL_1.1.tar.gz


We don’t need to unpack them.

2. Install GenABEL.data and GenABEL from a local source. Inside R, we can use install.packages, using the files we’ve just downloaded instead of the online repository.
install.packages(c("GenABEL.data_1.0.0.tar.gz", "GenABEL_1.8-0.tar.gz"), repos = NULL)

3. To install RepeatABEL, we first need hglm, which we can get from CRAN. After that has finished, we install RepeatABEL, again from local source:
install.packages("hglm")
install.packages("RepeatABEL_1.1.tar.gz", repos = NULL)


This worked on R version 3.6.1 running on Ubuntu 16.04, and also on Mac OS X.

Literature

Karssen, Lennart C., Cornelia M. van Duijn, and Yurii S. Aulchenko. ”The GenABEL Project for statistical genomics.” F1000Research 5 (2016).