Volcano plot (statistics)

Article summary

data. The red arrows indicate points-of-interest that display both large magnitude fold-changes (x axis) and high statistical significance (-log 10 of p value, y axis). The dashed red line shows where p = 0.05 with points above the line having p 0.05. This plot is colored such that those points having a fold-change less than 2 (log 2 = 1) are shown in gray. In statistics, a volcano plot is a type of scatter-plot that is used to quickly identify changes in large data sets composed of replicate data. It plots significance versus fold-change on the y and x axes, respectively. These plots are increasingly common in omic experiments such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics where one often has a list of many thousands of replicate data points between two conditions and one wishes to quickly identify the most meaningful changes. A volcano plot combines a measure of statistical significance from a statistical test (e.g., a p value from an ANOVA model) with the magnitude of the change, enabling quick visual identification of those data-points (genes, etc.) that display large magnitude changes that are also statistically significant. A volcano plot is a sophisticated data visualization tool used in statistical and genomic analyses to illustrate the relationship between the magnitude of change and statistical significance.…

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