Extending the Scaffold Hunter Visualization Toolkit with Interactive Heatmaps

Abstract

In many application areas, large amounts of data arise, which are often hard to interpret or make use of by humans. Interactive visualization can help to overview and explore large amounts of data. An example is in the life sciences, where databases of chemical compounds need to be analyzed in terms of similarities of molecular properties. Scientists then need to explore this data in an efficient way. The Scaffold Hunter framework is an Open Source software system for interactive visualization of highdimensional data. In this paper, we present an extension of Scaffold Hunter with an interactive heatmap, which ties in tightly with a dendrogram visualization. We added specific interaction modalities and views tailored to the analysis of chemical compounds. Zooming capabilities allow to start from an overview of the data (showing all data elements at once) down to a detail-on-demand view which includes chemical structural views of molecules. We show how the interactive heatmap with clustered rows and columns can bring new insights into the data regarding various properties. The implementation is made available for researchers and practitioners to use.