i2dash: Creation of Flexible, Interactive and Web-based Dashboards for Visualization of Omics-pipeline Results

Abstract

Data visualization and interactive data exploration are important aspects of illustrating complex concepts and results from analyses of omics data. A suitable visualization has to be intuitive and accessible. Web-based dashboards have become popular tools for the arrangement, consolidation and display of such visualizations. However, the combination of automated data processing pipelines handling omics data and dynamically generated, interactive dashboards is poorly solved. Here, we present i2dash, an R package intended to encapsulate functionality for programmatic creation of customized dashboards. It supports interactive and responsive (linked) visualizations across a set of predefined graphical layouts. i2dash addresses the needs of data analysts for a tool that is compatible and attachable to any R-based analysis pipeline, thereby fostering the separation of data visualization on one hand and data analysis tasks on the other hand. In addition, the generic design of i2dash enables data analysts to generate modular extensions for specific needs. As a proof of principle, we provide an extension of i2dash optimized for single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis, supporting the creation of dashboards for the visualization needs of single-cell sequencing experiments. Equipped with these features, i2dash is suitable for extensive use in large scale sequencing/bioinformatics facilities. Along this line, we provide i2dash as a containerized solution, enabling a straightforward large-scale deployment and sharing of dashboards using cloud services.i2dash is freely available via the R package archive CRAN.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.View Full Text