plotTernary: Create ternary simplex plots

In CytoSimplex: Simplex Visualization of Cell Fate Similarity in Single-Cell Data

Create ternary simplex plots

Description

Create ternary plots that show similarity between single cells and selected three terminals in a ternary baricentric coordinate.

Usage

plotTernary(x, ...)

## Default S3 method:
plotTernary(
  x,
  clusterVar,
  vertices,
  features = NULL,
  veloGraph = NULL,
  byCluster = NULL,
  processed = FALSE,
  method = c("euclidean", "cosine", "pearson", "spearman"),
  force = FALSE,
  sigma = 0.08,
  scale = TRUE,
  dotColorBy = NULL,
  dotColor = NULL,
  palette = "D",
  direction = 1,
  breaks = NULL,
  legendTitle = NULL,
  returnData = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

x	Input data. Can be a matrix or dgCMatrix object with cells as columns, a Seurat or SingleCellExperiment object. "simMat" method takes intermediate values.
...	Arguments passed on to plotTernary.simMat title Title text of the plot. Default NULL. nGrid Number of grids along the bottom side of the equilateral triangle. Default 10. radius Arrow length of unit velocity. Lower this when arrows point outside of the coordinate. Default 0.1. dotSize Dot aesthetics passed to geom_point. Default 0.6 when not interactive, 4 when interactive. dotShuffle Whether to shuffle the order of dots being added to the plot, useful when categorical colors are used and mixing of categories is expected. Default NULL does shuffle when dotColorBy given is categorical and does not otherwise. labelColors Colors of the axis lines and vertex labels. Default c("#3B4992FF", "#EE0000FF", "#008B45FF") (blue, red and green) vertexLabelSize Size of vertex labels. Default 6 when not interactive, 16 when interactive. vertexLabelDrift Position adjustment of the vertex labels, only applied to non-interactive view. Default 0.03. axisBreak Number of breaks to be labeled along axis. Default 5. axisTextShow Logical, whether to show axis text. Default TRUE. axisTextSize Size of text along each axis break. Default 4 for non-interactive view, 12 for interactive view. axisTextDrift Position adjustment of the axis text, only applied to non-interactive view. Default 0.01. gridLineAlpha Transparency of background grid lines. Default 0.6. arrowLinewidth Line width of the velocity arrows. Default 0.25 for non-interactive view, 2 for interactive view. arrowAngle Controls the angle of the arrowhead, only applied to non-interactive view. Default 20. arrowLen Control length in centimetre from arrow tip to arrow tail, only applied to non-interactive view. Default 0.2. titleSize Size of title text. Default 14 for non-interactive view, 20 for interactive view. equilateral Logical, whether to always display the triangle as equilateral. Default TRUE. margin Margin allowed around of the triangle plotting region when equilateral = TRUE interactive Logical. Whether to display plotly interactive view. Default FALSE.
clusterVar	A vector/factor assigning the cluster variable to each column of the matrix object. For "Seurat" method, NULL (default) for Idents(x), or a variable name in meta.data slot. For "SingleCellExperiment" method, NULL (default) for colLabels(x), or a variable name in colData slot.
vertices	Vector of three unique cluster names that will be used for plotting. Or a named list that groups clusters as three terminal vertices. There must not be any overlap between groups.
features	Valid matrix row subsetting index to select features for similarity calculation. Default NULL uses all available features.
veloGraph	Cell x cell dgCMatrix object containing velocity information. Shows velocity grid-arrow layer when specified. Default NULL does not show velocity.
byCluster	Default NULL to generate one plot with all cells. Set "all" to split cells in plot by cluster and returns a list of subplots for each cluster as well as the plot including all cells. Otherwise, a vector of cluster names to generate a list of subplots for the specified clusters.
processed	Logical. Whether the input matrix is already processed. TRUE will bypass internal preprocessing and input matrix will be directly used for similarity calculation. Default FALSE and raw count input is recommended. If missing in call, using slot = "counts" in "Seurat" method or using assay.type = "counts" in "SingleCellExperiment" method will force this argument to be FALSE and others for TRUE.
method	Similarity calculation method. Default "euclidean". Choose from "euclidean", "cosine", "pearson", "spearman".
force	Whether to force calculate the similarity when more then 500 features are detected, which is generally not recommended. Default FALSE.
sigma	Gaussian kernel parameter that controls the effect of variance. Only effective when using a distance metric (i.e. method is "euclidian" or "cosine"). Larger values tighten the dot spreading on figure. Default 0.08.
scale	Whether to min-max scale the distance matrix by clusters. Default TRUE.
dotColorBy	A vector/factor for coloring dots, can be either categorical (must be character or factor) or continuous. Default NULL.
dotColor	Character vector of color codes. When dotColorBy is NULL, use one or as many colors as the number of cells. If dotColorBy is categorical, specify as many colors as the number of categories in dotColorBy or ggplot2 categorical color palette is used by default. If dotColorBy is continuous, specify together with breaks argument.
palette	Color palette to use when dotColorBy is given. Default "D" (viridis) for continuous value and ggplot2 default for categorical value. See detail for alternatives.
direction	Sets the order of colors in the scale. Default 1 orders as palette default. If -1, the order of colors is reversed.
breaks	Number of breaks for continuous color scale passed to non-interactive "plot3D::scatter3D" call. Default NULL.
legendTitle	Title on the legend/colorbar. Default NULL uses "cluster" if dotColorBy is missing (default); user-end variable expression if dotColorBy is directly specified from plotQuaternary.default method; variable name if dotColorBy is specified from Seurat or SingleCellExperiment method.
returnData	Logical. Whether to return similarity and aggregated velocity data if applicable instead of generating plot. Default FALSE.

Details

Argument inheritance - For matrix/dgCMatrix ("default" method), we first calculate the similarity matrix and obtain a "simMat" object. Then the "simMat" method is internally called. For data container objects (e.g. Seurat), we obtain the correct data matrix first and then call the "default" method. The arguments inherits as the flow described above.

The calculation of similarity matrix - The similarity is calculated either by converting a distance metric ("euclidean" or "cosine") with Gaussian kernel, or directly computed with correlation metrics ("pearson" or "spearman"). The centroid of each terminal is obtained first, and the specified metric from each cell to each terminal is calculated. The similarity matrix (n cells by v terminals) is lastly normalized to sum to 1 for each cell, so it becomes a baricentric coordinate.

Value

By default, a "ggplot" object when byCluster is not specified, a list of "ggplot" object when byCluster is specified. When interactive = TRUE, a "plotly" object is returned. When returnData = TRUE, a list of similarity matrix and aggregated velocity matrix is returned.

See Also

Other plotTernary: plotTernary.Seurat(), plotTernary.SingleCellExperiment()

Examples

gene <- selectTopFeatures(rnaRaw, rnaCluster, c("OS", "RE", "CH"))
plotTernary(rnaRaw, rnaCluster, c("OS", "RE", "CH"), gene)

CytoSimplex documentation built on June 8, 2025, 10:12 a.m.