Figure 3

Method relationships. These are visualized using multidimensional scaling of the (a) Spearman and (b) Jaccard similarities (Additional data file 3). Proximate methods can be expected to yield similar category rankings (Spearman case) and sets of significant categories (Jaccard case). The figure shows that, property-wise, the methods range from KS and CM at the one extreme to the discrete method on the other (D1 to D6), whereas the other methods exhibit intermediate behaviors. Notably, ZC, with its strong ability to detect low-proportion-high-effects deviations, constitutes a threshold-free replacement for the discrete method. Method abbreviations are defined in Figure 2.