Heatmap

From WikiMD's Food, Medicine & Wellness Encyclopedia

Heatmap is a graphical representation of data where individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. It is a way of plotting data where the individual values that are contained in a matrix are represented as colors. Heatmaps are used in various forms of analytics but are most commonly used to show user behavior on specific webpages or webpage templates. Heatmaps can be used to show where users have clicked on a page, how far they have scrolled down a page, or used to display the results of eye tracking tests.

Overview[edit | edit source]

A heatmap is a data visualization tool that displays the magnitude of a phenomenon as color in two dimensions. The variation in color may be by hue or intensity, giving obvious visual cues to the reader about how the phenomenon is clustered or varies over space.

Applications[edit | edit source]

Heatmaps are used in many fields for various purposes. Here are some of the main applications:

  • Bioinformatics and computational biology: In these fields, heatmaps are used to represent the level of expression of many genes across a number of comparable samples (e.g., cells in different states, samples from different patients) as they are obtained from DNA microarrays.
  • Web analytics: In web analytics, a heatmap is a graphical representation of data related to the interaction of users with a Web site.
  • User experience design: Heatmaps are used to understand and visualize the user's behavior on a website or software application.

Construction[edit | edit source]

A heatmap can be constructed using a variety of software tools and programming languages such as R, Python, and specialized visualization software. The basic steps in constructing a heatmap include:

  • Data collection: This involves gathering the data to be visualized. This could be user interaction data, biological data, etc.
  • Data processing: The collected data is then processed and organized in a way that can be visualized. This often involves some form of aggregation or summarization of the data.
  • Visualization: The processed data is then visualized as a heatmap. This involves mapping each data point to a color and then plotting these colors on a grid.

See also[edit | edit source]

References[edit | edit source]


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Contributors: Prab R. Tumpati, MD