The ipyrad.analysis module: PCA

As part of the ipyrad.analysis toolkit we’ve created convenience functions for easily performing exploratory principal component analysis (PCA) on your data. PCA is a very standard dimension-reduction technique that is often used to get a general sense of how samples are related to one another. PCA has the advantage over STRUCTURE type analyses in that it is very fast. Similar to STRUCTURE, PCA can be used to produce simple and intuitive plots that can be used to guide downstream analysis. These are three very nice papers that talk about the application and interpretation of PCA in the context of population genetics:

A note on Jupyter/IPython

Jupyter notebooks are primarily a way to generate reproducible scientific analysis workflows in python. ipyrad analysis tools are best run inside Jupyter notebooks, as the analysis can be monitored and tweaked and provides a self-documenting workflow.

The rest of the materials in this part of the workshop assume you are running all code in cells of a jupyter notebook.

PCA analyses

Create a new notebook for the PCA

Similar how you’ve previously opened the Terminal, now open a new “Python 3” notebook by clicking on New.

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Download an empirical dataset

For this exercise we’ll use empirical data, so it’ll be more fun and also a bit more like running a PCA in real life than doing so with the simulated data would be. In a new cell in the notebook copy and paste this command and then click the ‘Run’ button:

!wget https://radcamp.github.io/Chicago2023/subset_cheetah.snps.hdf5

This .hdf5 file is one of the results files writen to the outputs directory of ipyrad after step 7.

Import ipyrad.analysis module

For this analysis, we’ll use python. The import keyword directs python to load a module into the currently running context. This is very similar to the library() function in R. We begin by importing the ipyrad analysis module. Copy the code below into a notebook cell and click run.

import ipyrad.analysis as ipa

The as ipa part here creates a short synonym so that we can refer to ipyrad.analysis as ipa, which is just faster to type.

Quick guide (tl;dr)

The following cell shows the quickest way to results using the small simulated dataset in /ipyrad-workshop. Complete explanation of all of the features and options of the PCA module is the focus of the rest of this tutorial. Copy this code into a new notebook cell (you can add new cells with the + button on the toolbar) and run it.

data = "cheetah.snps.hdf5"
## Create the pca object
pca = ipa.pca(data)
## Run the analysis
pca.run()
## Bam!
pca.draw()

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Note: In this block of code, the # at the beginning of a line indicates to python that this is a comment, so it doesn’t try to run this line. This is a very handy thing if you want to add or remove lines of code from an analysis without deleting them. Simply comment them out with the #!

Full guide

Simple PCA from ipyrad hdf5 file

In the most common use, you’ll want to plot the first two PCs, then inspect the output, remove any obvious outliers, and then redo the PCA.

## Path to the input data in snps.hdf5 format 
data = "cheetah.snps.hdf5"
pca = ipa.pca(data)

Note: Here we use the hdf5 database file with SNPs generated with ipyrad from the cheetah data. The database file contains the genotype calls information as well as linkage information that is used for subsampling unlinked SNPs and bootstrap resampling.

Note: The ipyrad.analysis.pca module can also read in data from any vcf file, so it’s possible to quickly generate PCA plots for any vcf from any dataset.

Now construct the default plot, which shows all samples and PCs 1 and 2.

pca.run()
pca.draw()

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Population assignment for sample colors

Typically it is useful to color points in a PCA by some a priori grouping, such as presumed population, or by experimental treatment groups, etc. To facilitate this it is possible to specify population assignments in a dictionary. The format of the dictionary should have populations as keys and lists of samples as values. Sample names need to be identical to the names in the input dataset, which we can verify with the names property of the PCA object. Open a new cell and type this:

pca.names

This will show you a list of sample names.

Here we create a python ‘dictionary’, which is a key/value pair data structure. The keys are the population names, in our case cheetah subspecies, and the values are the lists of samples that belong to those populations. You can copy and paste this into a new cell in your notebook.

imap = {"A.j.jubatus":['SRR19760918','SRR19760920','SRR19760921','SRR19760924','SRR19760927','SRR19760928','SRR19760942','SRR19760946','SRR19760947','SRR19760956'],
        "A.j.soemmeringii":['SRR19760910','SRR19760912','SRR19760954','SRR19760955','SRR19760957','SRR19760958','SRR19760959','SRR19760960','SRR19760961','SRR19760962'],
        "A.j.venaticus":['SRR19760950','SRR19760951','SRR19760953'],
        "Outgroup":['SRR19760949']}

Now create the pca object with the input data again, this time passing in the new dictionary as the second argument and specifying this as the imap, and plot the new figure. We can also easily add a title to our PCA plots with the label= argument.

pca = ipa.pca(data, imap=imap)
pca.run()
pca.draw(label="Sims colored by pop")

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This is just much nicer looking now, and it’s also much more straightforward to interpret.

Removing “bad” samples and replotting.

In PC analysis, it’s common for “bad” samples to dominate several of the first PCs, and thus “pop out” in a degenerate looking way. Bad samples of this kind can often be attributed to poor sequence quality or sample misidentifcation. Samples with lots of missing data tend to pop way out on their own, causing distortion in the signal in the PCs. Normally it’s best to evaluate the quality of the sample, and if it can be seen to be of poor quality, to remove it and replot the PCA. In our dataset, we don’t really have bad samples, but we do have an outlier: the outgroup (which in this case is Puma concolor). Because we’re intersted in cheetah only, let’s remove the outgroup sample and rerun the PCA.

Note: We make a lot of use of the interactivity of jupyter notebooks in the ipyrad.analysis tools. In the PCA you can ‘hover’ over points to reveal their sample ID.

The easiest way to achieve this is to simply remove the sample from the imap file and run the PCA again.

imap = {"A.j.jubatus":['SRR19760918','SRR19760920','SRR19760921','SRR19760924','SRR19760927','SRR19760928','SRR19760942','SRR19760946','SRR19760947','SRR19760956'],
        "A.j.soemmeringii":['SRR19760910','SRR19760912','SRR19760954','SRR19760955','SRR19760957','SRR19760958','SRR19760959','SRR19760960','SRR19760961','SRR19760962'],
        "A.j.venaticus":['SRR19760950','SRR19760951','SRR19760953']}
pca = ipa.pca(data, imap=imap)
pca.run()
pca.draw(label="Sims colored by pop (no outgroup)")

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Subsampling with replication

By default run() will randomly subsample one SNP per RAD locus to reduce the effect of linkage on your results. This can be turned off by setting subsample=False. However, subsampling unlinked SNPs is generally a good idea for PCA analyses since you want to remove the effects of linkage from your data. It also presents a convenient way to explore the confidence in your results. By using the option nreplicates you can run many replicate analyses that subsample a different random set of unlinked SNPs each time. The replicate results are drawn with a lower opacity and the centroid of all the points for each sample is plotted as a black point.

pca.run(nreplicates=10)
pca.draw();

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Plotting PCs other than 0 and 1

Even though PC 0 and 1 by definition explain the most variance in the data, it is still often useful to examine other PCs. You can do this by specifying which PCs to plot in in the call to draw.

pca.draw(2,3)

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Custom color points

Another nice feature of the draw method is the ability to pass in any custom color that you like for each population. You can do this in a couple different ways, but the most straightforward is just to pass in a list of valid color names from the ‘named colors’ matplotlib documentation.

pca.draw(colors=["hotpink", "skyblue", "goldenrod"])

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Saving a PCA plot to a file

You can save the figure as a PDF or SVG automatically by passing an outfile argument to the .draw() function.

# The outfile must end in either `.pdf` or `.svg`
pca.draw(outfile="cheetah-pca.pdf")

This will save cheetah-pca.pdf into your notebook environment. You can open the jupyter file browser and open or download the pdf from there.

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Dealing with missing data in PCA

PCA can be extremely sensitive to missing data if there is any pattern at all in the missingness.

We offer three algorithms for imputing missing data:

Here is an example of how to select an impute_method:

pca1 = ipa.pca(
    data=data,
    imap=imap,
    impute_method='sample',
)

A fourth approach is to simply enforce an lower bound on missing data with the mincov parameter. mincov specifies the minimum coverage threshold below which a snp is excluded from the analysis.

This code will exclude any snp not present in 100% of samples, a very strict threshold.

pca2 = ipa.pca(
    data=data,
    mincov=1.0,
    impute_method=None,
)

We encourage you to experiment with different imputation schemes and missing data thresholds when analysing your own data later.

More to explore

The ipyrad.analysis.pca module has many more features that we just don’t have time to go over, but you might be interested in checking them out later: