pylisto 0.8.2

Performing comprehensive overlap assessments

pylisto

pylisto is a tool for performing comprehensive overlap assessments on dictionaries comprising lists of strings, such as lists of gene sets. It can assess:

• Overlaps of pairs of lists of strings selected from the same universe.
• Overlaps of pairs of lists of strings selected from different universes.
• Overlaps of triplets of lists of strings selected from the same universe.

While pylisto has been developed with scRNA-seq data analysis in mind, the methodology is fully applicable for the same problem arising in any other setting. Thus, the implementation of pylisto uses general Python objects (Pandas data frames, lists of strings), rather than scRNA-seq-specific objects.

Installation

Install with:

pip install pylisto

Description and usage

This section will elaborate on the functionality and usage of pylisto. It discusses first the overlaps of individual elements, then the details of how the dictionaries of elements must be provided as input.

Items

Each item taking part in an individual overlap assessed by pylisto is a list of strings. Each overlap assessment of lists of strings answers the question of whether the lists intersect each other to a statistically significant extent.

Lists

The run_listo function runs the entire pylisto pipeline. It requires two dictionaries as input. Each dictionary can store two types of elements:

• Lists of strings.
• Data frames with a numeric column specified by the num_col parameter.

A third dictionary, likewise containing one of the two aforementioned types of elements, can be optionally provided.

Extracting items from lists

Items to be used in the overlap assessments are extracted from the input dictionaries as follows:

• Lists of strings: They are used as such.

• Data frames: The rownames of the data frame are selected, and overlaps are calculated based on cutoffs determined by the distinct values in the column specified by num_col. The median of the resulting p-values is taken to be the p-value of the corresponding overlap.