ModVis: An information visualization tool for gene module discovery

The repeated grouping of genes across module sets produced by different module discovery methods may prove to be biologically significant in the area of functional genomics. To ease in the exploration of these overlapping groups of genes, we introduce ModVis, a software tool that allows for the interactive visualization of module discovery data, with an emphasis on the overlap between data sets derived from different methods. Our tool provides a high-level overview of multiple module sets, displaying the modules in each set, and the location and magnitude of the overlap between sets. The tool’s more-detailed visualization displays a heat map for a particular gene module, and organizes the heat maps for its overlapping modules so that the individual genes involved in the overlap become readily apparent.