BatchServer: a web server for batch effect evaluation, visualization and correction

Batch effects are unwanted data variations that may obscure biological signals, leading to bias or errors in subsequent data analyses. Effective evaluation and elimination of batch effects are necessary for omics data analysis. In order to facilitate the evaluation and correction of batch effects, here we present BatchSever, an open-source R/Shiny based user-friendly interactive graphical web platform for batch effects analysis. In BatchServer we introduced autoComBat, a modified version of ComBat, which is the most widely adopted tool for batch effect correction. BatchServer uses PVCA (Principal Variance Component Analysis) and UMAP (Manifold Approximation and Projection) for evaluation and visualizion of batch effects. We demonstate its application in multiple proteomics and transcriptomic data sets. BatchServer is provided at https://lifeinfo.shinyapps.io/batchserver/ as a web server. The source codes are freely available at https://github.com/guomics-lab/batch_server.