Hiplot: a comprehensive and easy-to-use web service boosting publication-ready biomedical data visualization

Abstract

Modern web techniques provide an unprecedented opportunity for leveraging complex biomedical data generating in clinical, omics, and mechanism experiments. Currently, the functions for carrying out publication-ready biomedical data visualization represent primary technical hurdles in the state-of-art omics-based web services, whereas the demand for visualization-based interactive data mining is ever-growing. Here, we propose an easy-to-use web service, Hiplot (https://hiplot.com.cn), equipping with comprehensive and interactive biomedical data visualization functions (230+) including basic statistics, multi-omics, regression, clustering, dimensional reduction, meta-analysis, survival analysis, risk modeling, etc. We used the demo and real datasets to demonstrate the usage workflow and the core functions of Hiplot. It permits users to conveniently and interactively complete a few specialized visualization tasks that previously could only be done by senior bioinformatics or biostatistics researchers. A modern web client with efficient user interfaces and interaction methods has been implemented based on the custom components library and the extensible plugin system. The versatile output can also be produced in different environments via using the cross-platform portable command-line interface (CLI) program, Hctl. A switchable view between the editable data table and the file uploader/path selection could facilitate data importing, previewing, and exporting, while the plumber-based response strategy significantly reduced the time costs for generating basic scientific graphics. Diversified layouts, themes/styles, and color palettes in this website allow users to create high-quality and publication-ready graphics. Researchers devoted to both life and data science may benefit from the emerging web service.