However we arrive at estimates of taxonomic abundance, it is usually helpful to create a visualization that summarizes the broad trends in the data in a single figure. One expressive and easy to interpret visualization is a heat tree. These are renderings of phylogenetic trees of the taxons of interest with data mapped onto visual elements of the render. For example, the number of times a taxon is seen may be expressed by changing the color or thickness of a tree branch. Different datasets can be easily compared by examining trees of each for differences. In this recipe, we'll construct a heat tree and customize it.
Visualizing taxonomic abundances with heat trees in metacoder
Getting ready
We need the input .biom file...