Qlucore, a provider of bioinformatics software, has published an easy-to-use guide that shows how visualisation techniques can be used to obtain important new findings for researchers. The guide, which includes a simple five-step process for sophisticated data analysis, is available as a complimentary download from the Qlucore web site.
Although the exploration and analysis of large data sets can be challenging for many industries and applications, the use of visualisation can provide a powerful way of identifying important structures and patterns very quickly. The use of visualisation is based on the fact that the human brain is very good at detecting structures and patterns. As such, if data can be visualised in a clear way, researchers can identify any interesting and/or significant results easily, by themselves, without having to rely on specialist bioinformaticians and biostatisticians.
Qlucore's five-step approach to visualisation is particularly useful for finding patterns and structure in large data sets of multivariate character. Although Qlucore proposes that researchers use rapid visualisation based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the guide is generic, so other visualisation techniques can also be applied.
