6–9 Jul 2026
Europe/Warsaw timezone

Let triangles solve your multinomial problems: Using simplexes to analyze low dimension trade-offs

7 Jul 2026, 16:20
5m
Lightning Talk (5 minutes) Lightning Talks

Speaker

Liam Mueller (UC San Diego)

Description

How should we best model multinomial tradeoffs? When there are only two options that sum to 100 percent, it can be straightforward to employ options like GLM to address research questions with binomial response data, but when there are more than two groups, these multinomial models become too complex to perform and too convoluted for our audience to understand. However, using simplexes to define the experimental outcome space instead of trying to fit the data into conventional statistical space brings the inherent trade-offs of the data to the forefront and hypothesis testing becomes intuitive. In this talk I will demonstrate how two sets of data benefit from simplex analysis and how we can visualize the results easily. First, by making small modifications to the ‘Ternary’ package, I will show an experiment examining the outcome of gene knockdowns modifying the probability that a cell is arrested in different stages of the cell division cycle (G1, G2, S), and how that can be modeled using ternary diagrams. Then, using the ‘klaR’ package, I will show how this idea can be scaled into larger dimensions by highlighting an experiment examining four possible types of instruction observed in college classrooms. Finally, we will explore how the ‘plotly’ package can be modified to show tetrahedrons in three dimensions, allowing us to make interactive simplex diagrams.

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Additional Material or Paper

We published results using this approach earlier this year: https://www.lifescied.org/eprint/SWNC4KAFBUAZUCYHXEYH/full

Keywords: Please list up to 5 keywords to help us find the right session for your contribution. Simplex models,
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Interested in serving as reviewer? This will be my first time attending this conference, but if my input will still be valuable, I am happy to help: lomueller@ucsd.edu

Author

Liam Mueller (UC San Diego)

Presentation materials

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