In MonashBioinformaticsPlatform/varistran: Variance Stabilizing Transformations appropriate for RNA-Seq expression data

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
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This vignette demonstrates the vst function for Variance Stabilizing Transformation (VST) of count data, as well as various useful diagnostic plots.

Setup

I will use the Bioconductor airway dataset as an example.

library(varistran)
library(Matrix)
library(airway)

# Load example data
data("airway")

# Readable sample and gene names
colnames(airway) <- paste0(airway$dex,rep(1:4,each=2))
rownames(airway) <- rowData(airway)$symbol

counts <- assay(airway, "counts")

Variance Stabilizing Transformation

Filtering is recommended as a first step before using vst. Use your favourite filtering method, for example edgeR::filterByExpr provides a slightly better approach than what I do here:

keep <- rowSums(counts >= 10) >= 4
table(keep)

counts_kept <- counts[keep,,drop=FALSE]

We can now apply a VST using vst. By default Anscombe's VST for negative binomial data is used. This is like a log2 transformation for large counts, but is a bit different for small counts. The data is also normalized for library size, by default with TMM adjustment. Here I request values that can be interpreted as log2 CPM.

lcpm <- vst(counts_kept, cpm=TRUE)

A better estimate of the dispersion can be obtained by specifying a design matrix. This ensures real signal in the data is not treated as noise.

design <- model.matrix(~ 0 + dex + cell, data=colData(airway))

lcpm <- vst(counts_kept, design=design, cpm=TRUE)

Stability plot

plot_stability allows assessment of how well the variance has been stabilized. Ideally this will produce a horizontal line, but counts below 5 will always show a drop off in variance.

plot_stability(lcpm, counts_kept, design=design)

Biplot

plot_biplot provides a two-dimensional overview of your samples and genes using Principle Components Analysis (similar concept to plotMDS in limma).

plot_biplot(lcpm)

Heatmap

plot_heatmap draws a heatmap. Specify n=... to only show the top genes by span of values.

plot_heatmap(lcpm, n=50)

Shiny report

Varistran's various diagnostic plots are also available as a Shiny app, which can be launched with:

shiny_report(lcpm, counts_kept)

MonashBioinformaticsPlatform/varistran documentation built on June 9, 2025, 8:36 a.m.