simphony is a framework for simulating rhythmic data,
especially gene expression data. Here we show an example of using it to
benchmark a method for detecting rhythmicity.
Internally, simphony uses the data.table
package, which provides an enhanced version of the standard R
data.frame. We’ll use data.table for this
example as well.
library('data.table')
library('ggplot2')
library('kableExtra')
library('knitr')
library('limma')
library('precrec')
library('simphony')Here we create a data.table called
featureGroups that specifies the desired properties of the
simulated genes. We want 75% of simulated genes to be non-rhythmic and
25% to have a rhythm amplitude of 1.1. Properties not specified in
featureGroups will be given their default values.
Our simulated experiment will have 200 genes. Expression values will be sampled from the negative binomial family, which models read counts from next-generation sequencing data. The interval between time points will be 2 (default period of 24), with one replicate per time point. We also use the default time range of our simulated data points of between 0 and 48 hours.
set.seed(44)
featureGroups = data.table(fracFeatures = c(0.75, 0.25), amp = c(0, 0.3))
simData = simphony(featureGroups, nFeatures = 200, interval = 2, nReps = 1, family = 'negbinom')The output of simphony has three components:
abundData, sampleMetadata, and
featureMetadata. abundData is a matrix that
contains the simulated expression values. Each row of corresponds to a
gene, each column corresponds to a sample. Since we sampled from the
negative binomial family, all expression values are integers.
kable(simData$abundData[1:3, 1:3])| sample_01 | sample_02 | sample_03 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| feature_001 | 282 | 154 | 181 |
| feature_002 | 213 | 310 | 200 |
| feature_003 | 304 | 294 | 273 |
sampleMetadata is a data.table that
contains the condition (cond) and time for each sample.
Here we simulated one condition, so cond is 1 for all
samples.
kable(simData$sampleMetadata[1:3])| sample | cond | time |
|---|---|---|
| sample_01 | cond_1 | 0 |
| sample_02 | cond_1 | 2 |
| sample_03 | cond_1 | 4 |
featureMetadata is a data.table that
contains the properties of each simulated gene in each condition. The
group column corresponds to the row in
featureGroups to which the gene belongs.
kable(simData$featureMetadata[149:151, !'dispFunc']) %>%
kable_styling(font_size = 12)| cond | group | feature | fracFeatures | amp | amp0 | phase | period | rhyFunc | base | base0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cond_1 | 1 | feature_149 | 0.75 | function (m) , x | 0.0 | 0 | 24 | .Primitive(“sin”) | function (x) , defaultValue | 8 |
| cond_1 | 1 | feature_150 | 0.75 | function (m) , x | 0.0 | 0 | 24 | .Primitive(“sin”) | function (x) , defaultValue | 8 |
| cond_1 | 2 | feature_151 | 0.25 | function (m) , x | 0.3 | 0 | 24 | .Primitive(“sin”) | function (x) , defaultValue | 8 |
Here we plot the simulated time-course for a non-rhythmic gene and a
rhythmic gene. We use the mergeSimData function to merge
the expression values, the sample metadata, and the gene metadata.
fmExample = simData$featureMetadata[feature %in% c('feature_150', 'feature_151')]
dExample = mergeSimData(simData, fmExample$feature)We also want to compare the simulated expression values with their
underlying distributions over time, for which we can use the
getExpectedAbund function. Since we sampled from the
negative binomial family, the resulting mu column
corresponds to the expected log2 counts.
dExpect = getExpectedAbund(fmExample, 24, times = seq(0, 48, 0.25))Then it all comes together with ggplot.
dExample[, featureLabel := paste(feature, ifelse(amp0 == 0, '(non-rhythmic)', '(rhythmic)'))]
dExpect[, featureLabel := paste(feature, ifelse(amp0 == 0, '(non-rhythmic)', '(rhythmic)'))]
ggplot(dExample) +
facet_wrap(~ featureLabel, nrow = 1) +
geom_line(aes(x = time, y = log2(2^mu + 1)), size = 0.25, data = dExpect) +
geom_point(aes(x = time, y = log2(abund + 1)), shape = 21, size = 2.5) +
labs(x = 'Time (h)', y = expression(log[2](counts + 1))) +
scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0, 48), breaks = seq(0, 48, 8))We can use the limma package to detect rhythmic genes
based on a linear model that corresponds to cosinor regression.
sampleMetadata = copy(simData$sampleMetadata)
sampleMetadata[, timeCos := cos(time * 2 * pi / 24)]
sampleMetadata[, timeSin := sin(time * 2 * pi / 24)]
design = model.matrix(~ timeCos + timeSin, data = sampleMetadata)Here we follow the typical limma workflow: fit the
linear model for each gene, run empirical Bayes, and extract the
relevant summary statistics. We pass lmFit the
log2 transformed counts.
fit = lmFit(log2(simData$abundData + 1), design)
fit = eBayes(fit, trend = TRUE)
rhyLimma = topTable(fit, coef = 2:3, number = Inf)First we merge the results from limma with the known
amplitudes from featureMetadata.
rhyLimma$feature = rownames(rhyLimma)
rhyLimma = merge(data.table(rhyLimma), simData$featureMetadata[, .(feature, amp0)], by = 'feature')We can plot the distributions of p-values of rhythmicity for non-rhythmic and rhythmic genes. P-values for non-rhythmic genes are uniformly distributed between 0 and 1, as they should be under the null hypothesis. P-values for rhythmic genes, on the other hand, tend to be closer to 0.
ggplot(rhyLimma) +
geom_jitter(aes(x = factor(amp0), y = P.Value), shape = 21, width = 0.2) +
labs(x = expression('Rhythm amplitude ' * (log[2] ~ counts)), y = 'P-value of rhythmicity')Finally, we can summarize the ability to distinguish non-rhythmic and
rhythmic genes using a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve
(here we use the precrec package).
rocprc = evalmod(scores = -log(rhyLimma$P.Value), labels = rhyLimma$amp0 > 0)
autoplot(rocprc, 'ROC')