Thursday, June 28, 2007

An improved flowSet idiom?

In flowCore, a flowSet is associated with an AnnotatedDataFrame that contains ancillary information about the frame. This seems really useful, but it's really only used by the flowViz package---there really isn't anything remotely resembling a useful interactive idiom. Now, we could use subset(), assuming we could ever get the generic working properly, but we already have Subset in flowCore and the opportunity for confusion is high. One idea that has occurred to me is to take advantage of the ellipsis argument in [ and [[ to let us say things like


patient[[CellType="B Cells"]]

to extract the flowFrame identified by the CellType column.

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