[Bioc-devel] BamTallyParam argument 'which'

Hervé Pagès hpages at fredhutch.org
Wed Feb 25 22:21:18 CET 2015


Hi,

On 02/25/2015 06:37 AM, Gabe Becker wrote:
> I think we need to be a little careful of trying to know the users
> intentions better than they do here.  Reduce is a (very) easy operation
> to do on a GRanges, so if the user didn't, are we really safe assuming
> they "meant to" when passing the GRanges as a which?
>
> I would argue for "the samtools way", not because samtools does it
> (though consistency is good) but because it allows the user to do more
> things, while not making it that painful to do the thing that they might
> want most often.
>
> I agree with Michael that an additional argument might be a good middle
> ground.

Maybe another good middle ground is to issue a warning when 'which'
contains overlapping ranges. The warning could suggest to the user
to reduce() the ranges first. Maybe the warning should also point
out that reducing doesn't completely eliminate the risk of selecting
the same record more than once (at least that's the case for the
readGAlignment* functions, but I don't know if it holds for
BamTallyParam). The risk is actually higher with paired-end reads
where the same pair is selected once for each range in 'which' that
overlaps with at least one of the 2 mates in the pair.

But as already discussed here (or maybe it was on the old bioconductor
list, don't remember), better solutions to the "duplicated selection"
problem could be achieved via one of the following:

   (1) Expose some sort of unique id for the records in a BAM file.
       I agree with Michael that "duplicated selection" is incompatible
       with summarization tools like BamTallyParam or pileup(). Having
       access to a unique id would completely solve the problem.

   (2) Introduce an argument similar to 'which' but with a slightly
       different semantic e.g. select records that *start* in one of
       the specified ranges (for single-end reads), or select pairs of
       records for which the *first* mate starts in one of the specified
       ranges.
       Advantages of this semantic:

         (a) If the ranges don't overlap, then no duplicates.

         (b) It can be used in the context of tiling the genome and
             processing the reads by tile. This plays well with
             parallelization (the semantic of 'which' does not).

       Inconvenient: the arbitrary nature of the selection criteria
       and its lack of symmetry is incompatible with summarization
       tools like BamTallyParam or pileup().

Note that (1) and (2) are not exclusive.

Cheers,
H.

>
> ~G
>
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Leonardo Collado Torres
> <lcollado at jhu.edu <mailto:lcollado at jhu.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Related to my post on a separate thread
>     (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2015-February/006978.html),
>     I think that if 'which' is not being reduced by default, a simple
>     example showing the effects of this could be included in the functions
>     that have such an argument. Also note that 'reducing' could lead to
>     unintended results.
>
>     For example, in the help page for GenomicAlignments::readGAlignments,
>     after the 'gal4' example it would be nice to add something like this:
>
>
>     ## Note that if overlapping ranges are provided in 'which'
>     ## reads could be selected more than once. This would artificually
>     ## increase the coverage or affect other downstream results.
>     ## If you 'reduce' the ranges, reads that originally overlapped
>     ## two disjoint segments will be included.
>
>     which_dups <- RangesList(seq1=rep(IRanges(1000, 2000), 2),
>          seq2=IRanges(c(100, 1000), c(1000, 2000)))
>     param_dups <- ScanBamParam(which=which_dups)
>     param_reduced <- ScanBamParam(which=reduce(which_dups))
>     gal4_dups <- readGAlignments(bamfile, param=param_dups)
>     gal4_reduced <- readGAlignments(bamfile, param=param_reduced)
>
>
>     length(gal4)
>
>     ## Duplicates some reads. In this case, all the ones between
>     ## bases 1000 and 2000 on seq1.
>     length(gal4_dups)
>
>     ## Includes some reads that mapped around base 1000 in seq2
>     ## that were excluded in gal4.
>     length(gal4_reduced)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     Here's the output:
>
>
>
>      > library('GenomicAlignments')
>      >
>      > ## Code already included in ?readGAlignments
>      > bamfile <- system.file("extdata", "ex1.bam", package="Rsamtools",
>     +                        mustWork=TRUE)
>      > which <- RangesList(seq1=IRanges(1000, 2000),
>     +                     seq2=IRanges(c(100, 1000), c(1000, 2000)))
>      > param <- ScanBamParam(which=which)
>      > gal4 <- readGAlignments(bamfile, param=param)
>      > gal4
>     GAlignments object with 2404 alignments and 0 metadata columns:
>               seqnames strand       cigar    qwidth     start       end
>     width     njunc
>                  <Rle>  <Rle> <character> <integer> <integer> <integer>
>     <integer> <integer>
>           [1]     seq1      +         35M        35       970      1004
>         35         0
>           [2]     seq1      +         35M        35       971      1005
>         35         0
>           [3]     seq1      +         35M        35       972      1006
>         35         0
>           [4]     seq1      +         35M        35       973      1007
>         35         0
>           [5]     seq1      +         35M        35       974      1008
>         35         0
>           ...      ...    ...         ...       ...       ...       ...
>        ...       ...
>        [2400]     seq2      +         35M        35      1524      1558
>         35         0
>        [2401]     seq2      +         35M        35      1524      1558
>         35         0
>        [2402]     seq2      -         35M        35      1528      1562
>         35         0
>        [2403]     seq2      -         35M        35      1532      1566
>         35         0
>        [2404]     seq2      -         35M        35      1533      1567
>         35         0
>        -------
>        seqinfo: 2 sequences from an unspecified genome
>      >
>      > ## Note that if overlapping ranges are provided in 'which'
>      > ## reads could be selected more than once. This would artificually
>      > ## increase the coverage or affect other downstream results.
>      > ## If you 'reduce' the ranges, reads that originally overlapped
>      > ## two disjoint segments will be included.
>      >
>      > which_dups <- RangesList(seq1=rep(IRanges(1000, 2000), 2),
>     +     seq2=IRanges(c(100, 1000), c(1000, 2000)))
>      > param_dups <- ScanBamParam(which=which_dups)
>      > param_reduced <- ScanBamParam(which=reduce(which_dups))
>      > gal4_dups <- readGAlignments(bamfile, param=param_dups)
>      > gal4_reduced <- readGAlignments(bamfile, param=param_reduced)
>      >
>      >
>      > length(gal4)
>     [1] 2404
>      >
>      > ## Duplicates some reads. In this case, all the ones between
>      > ## bases 1000 and 2000 on seq1.
>      > length(gal4_dups)
>     [1] 3014
>      >
>      > ## Includes some reads that mapped around base 1000 in seq2
>      > ## that were excluded in gal4.
>      > length(gal4_reduced)
>     [1] 2343
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      > options(width = 120)
>      > devtools::session_info()
>     Session
>     info-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>       setting  value
>       version  R Under development (unstable) (2014-11-01 r66923)
>       system   x86_64, darwin10.8.0
>       ui       AQUA
>       language (EN)
>       collate  en_US.UTF-8
>       tz       America/New_York
>
>     Packages---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>       package           * version date       source
>       base64enc           0.1.2   2014-06-26 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       BatchJobs           1.4     2014-09-24 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       BBmisc              1.7     2014-06-21 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       BiocGenerics      * 0.13.4  2014-12-31 Bioconductor
>       BiocParallel        1.1.13  2015-01-27 Bioconductor
>       Biostrings        * 2.35.8  2015-02-14 Bioconductor
>       bitops              1.0.6   2013-08-17 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       brew                1.0.6   2011-04-13 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       checkmate           1.5.0   2014-10-19 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       codetools           0.2.9   2014-08-21 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       DBI                 0.3.1   2014-09-24 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       devtools            1.6.1   2014-10-07 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       digest              0.6.4   2013-12-03 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       fail                1.2     2013-09-19 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       foreach             1.4.2   2014-04-11 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       GenomeInfoDb      * 1.3.13  2015-02-13 Bioconductor
>       GenomicAlignments * 1.3.27  2015-01-26 Bioconductor
>       GenomicRanges     * 1.19.37 2015-02-13 Bioconductor
>       IRanges           * 2.1.38  2015-02-08 Bioconductor
>       iterators           1.0.7   2014-04-11 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       Rsamtools         * 1.19.27 2015-02-07 Bioconductor
>       RSQLite             1.0.0   2014-10-25 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       rstudioapi          0.1     2014-03-27 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       S4Vectors         * 0.5.20  2015-02-19 Bioconductor
>       sendmailR           1.2.1   2014-09-21 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       stringr             0.6.2   2012-12-06 CRAN (R 3.2.0)
>       XVector           * 0.7.4   2015-02-08 Bioconductor
>       zlibbioc            1.13.1  2015-02-11 Bioconductor
>      >
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Leonard Goldstein
>     <goldstein.leonard at gene.com <mailto:goldstein.leonard at gene.com>> wrote:
>      > Sounds very sensible not to double count in the context of tallying
>      > variants. I was more concerned with reducing which as the default
>      > behavior for scanBam and other functions.
>      >
>      > I wanted to bring up the samtools behavior as - for me at least -
>      > inconsistencies between Rsamtools and samtools have been another
>      > source of confusion in the past (e.g. different naming
>     conventions for
>      > fields like isize vs TLEN etc.)
>      >
>      > Leonard
>      >
>      >
>      > On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Michael Lawrence
>      > <lawrence.michael at gene.com <mailto:lawrence.michael at gene.com>> wrote:
>      >> Maybe Rsamtools would want to follow this precedent. I think
>     there might be
>      >> a difference between fishing out alignments from a SAM/BAM, and
>     deriving a
>      >> summary (tallyVariants) from a BAM. It seems like an argument
>     could be made
>      >> for a tally set to not contain duplicates.
>      >>
>      >> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Leonard Goldstein
>      >> <goldstein.leonard at gene.com <mailto:goldstein.leonard at gene.com>>
>     wrote:
>      >>>
>      >>> Hi Michael and Thomas,
>      >>>
>      >>> I ran into the same problem in the past (i.e. when I started
>     working
>      >>> with functions like scanBam I expected them not to return the same
>      >>> alignment multiple times)
>      >>>
>      >>> One thing to consider might be that returning alignments multiple
>      >>> times is consistent with the behavior of the samtools view command.
>      >>> Quoting from the samtools manual:
>      >>>
>      >>> “Important note: when multiple regions are given, some
>     alignments may
>      >>> be output multiple times if they overlap more than one of the
>      >>> specified regions.”
>      >>>
>      >>> Maybe there is an argument for keeping things consistent with
>      >>> samtools? As you said, if documented properly, the user can decide
>      >>> whether to reduce regions specified in which or not.
>      >>>
>      >>> Leonard
>      >>>
>      >>>
>      >>> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Michael Lawrence
>      >>> <lawrence.michael at gene.com <mailto:lawrence.michael at gene.com>>
>     wrote:
>      >>> > We should at leaast try to avoid surprising the user. Seems
>     like most
>      >>> > people expect "which" to be a simple restriction, so I think
>     for now I
>      >>> > will
>      >>> > just reduce the which, and if someone has a use case for separate
>      >>> > queries,
>      >>> > we can address it in the future.
>      >>> >
>      >>> > On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Thomas Sandmann
>      >>> > <sandmann.thomas at gene.com <mailto:sandmann.thomas at gene.com>>
>      >>> > wrote:
>      >>> >
>      >>> >> Personally, I don't have a use case with "meaningful loci" worth
>      >>> >> tracking,
>      >>> >> so keeping it simple would work for me.
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> Incidentally, would it be good to deal with the 'which'
>     parameter in a
>      >>> >> consistent way across different methods ? I just saw this
>     recent post
>      >>> >> on
>      >>> >> the mailing list in which a used got confused by duplicate
>     counts
>      >>> >> returned
>      >>> >> after passing 'which' to scanBamParam:
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >>
>     https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2015-February/006978.html
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> ---
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> Thomas Sandmann, PhD
>      >>> >> Computational biologist
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> Genentech, Inc.
>      >>> >> 1 DNA Way
>      >>> >> South San Francisco, CA 94080
>      >>> >> USA
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> Phone: +1 650 225 6273 <tel:%2B1%20650%20225%206273>
>      >>> >> Fax: +1 650 225 5389 <tel:%2B1%20650%20225%205389>
>      >>> >> Email: sandmann.thomas at gene.com
>     <mailto:sandmann.thomas at gene.com>
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in
>     doubts; but if
>      >>> >> he
>      >>> >> will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in
>     certainties." --
>      >>> >> Sir
>      >>> >> Francis Bacon
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 10:37 AM, Michael Lawrence <
>      >>> >> lawrence.michael at gene.com
>     <mailto:lawrence.michael at gene.com>> wrote:
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >>> We just have to decide which is the more useful
>     interpretation of
>      >>> >>> which
>      >>> >>> -- as a simple restriction, or as a vector of meaningful
>     locii, which
>      >>> >>> will
>      >>> >>> be analyzed individually? I would actually favor the first
>     one (the
>      >>> >>> same as
>      >>> >>> yours), just because it's simpler. To keep track of the
>     query ranges,
>      >>> >>> we
>      >>> >>> would need to add a new column to the returned object,
>     which will more
>      >>> >>> often than not just be clutter. I guess we could introduce
>     a new
>      >>> >>> parameter,
>      >>> >>> "reduceWhich" which defaults to TRUE and reduces the which.
>     If FALSE,
>      >>> >>> it
>      >>> >>> instead adds the column mapping back to the original which
>     ranges.
>      >>> >>>
>      >>> >>>
>      >>> >>> On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Thomas Sandmann <
>      >>> >>> sandmann.thomas at gene.com <mailto:sandmann.thomas at gene.com>>
>     wrote:
>      >>> >>>
>      >>> >>>> Hi Michael,
>      >>> >>>>
>      >>> >>>> ah, I see. I hadn't realized that returning the pileups
>     separately
>      >>> >>>> for
>      >>> >>>> each region could be a desired feature, but that makes
>     sense. I
>      >>> >>>> agree, as
>      >>> >>>> it is easy for the user to 'reduce' the ranges beforehand
>     your first
>      >>> >>>> option
>      >>> >>>> (e.g. returning the ID of the range) would be more flexible.
>      >>> >>>>
>      >>> >>>> Perhaps you would consider adding a sentence to the
>     documentation of
>      >>> >>>> 'which' on BamTallyParam's help page explaining that users
>     might want
>      >>> >>>> to
>      >>> >>>> 'reduce' their ranges beforehand if they are only
>     interested in a
>      >>> >>>> single
>      >>> >>>> tally for each base ?
>      >>> >>>>
>      >>> >>>> Thanks a lot !
>      >>> >>>> Thomas
>      >>> >>>>
>      >>> >>>>
>      >>> >>>
>      >>> >>
>      >>> >
>      >>> >         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>      >>> >
>      >>> > _______________________________________________
>      >>> > Bioc-devel at r-project.org <mailto:Bioc-devel at r-project.org>
>     mailing list
>      >>> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>      >>
>      >>
>      >
>      > _______________________________________________
>      > Bioc-devel at r-project.org <mailto:Bioc-devel at r-project.org>
>     mailing list
>      > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Bioc-devel at r-project.org <mailto:Bioc-devel at r-project.org> mailing list
>     https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>
>
>
>
> --
> Gabriel Becker, Ph.D
> Computational Biologist
> Genentech Research

-- 
Hervé Pagès

Program in Computational Biology
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514
P.O. Box 19024
Seattle, WA 98109-1024

E-mail: hpages at fredhutch.org
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