bettr: a better way to explore what is best

As new (computational) methods come along, it becomes essential to compare their performance to existing ones via objective and fair benchmarking.

In a benchmarking study, typically many different performance metrics are calculated and used to reflect different aspects of performance. These performance metrics can then be combined into one “overall” ranking. However, not all aspects are equally important to everyone, and thus there is more than one “right” way of aggregating metrics in order to rank methods.

bettr is our proposal to perform this aggregation in an interactive way, allowing the user to focus on the aspects that are most important to them, and use different types of visualization approaches, enhancing the final overview of the benchmarking process.

The screenshots below display two of the representations provided by bettr, using data from the benchmark of single-cell clustering methods performed by Duo et al (2018).

Installation

bettr can be installed from Bioconductor (from release 3.19 onwards):

if (!require("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
    install.packages("BiocManager")

BiocManager::install("bettr")

The latest development version can be installed from GitHub via

BiocManager::install("federicomarini/bettr")

Usage

For more details on how to use bettr, we refer to the vignette. If you have questions or run into problems, feel free to open an issue. Try to provide a reproducible example, and always include the code you used and your session info, that will make it much easier for us to help.

Contributing to bettr

If you would like to contribute to bettr, you can do so by sending a pull request to this repository. If the contribution involves changes in the functionality provided by bettr, we encourage you to first open an issue to discuss the intended contribution.