Suggested modifications to web interface

[ArtPoon]

Some possible enhancements to interface:

• toggle between by-country and by-clade views - I think currently user has to go up one level to do this there is not a one-to-one map between views (region versus variant)
• change how clades are ordered - this can follow hierarchical nomenclature or decreasing order of frequency?
• display clade frequencies as streamgraph?
• collapse unselected clades into an "other" category?
• clade frequency colour should map to location (region/country) checkbox interface
• resize points by sample size?
• it might be nice to have some deterministic system for assigning colours to clades and countries, such that related clades and adjacent countries have similar but distinguishable colours

[ivan-aksamentov]

change how clades are ordered - this can follow hierarchical nomenclature or decreasing order of frequency?

I think the order comes from the data, so it is preferable to tweak it there. We might add sorting in the app if there is need for dynamic sorting.

Basically, the idea is to not add any extra runtime to the app, which can be done offline instead.

it might be nice to have some deterministic system for assigning colours to clades and countries, such that related clades and adjacent countries have similar but distinguishable colours

I am using "colorhash" function, which converts strings into colors deterministically. We may or may not want to have a fixed palette or some more sophisticated algo for colors. This depends on scientific needs, notably, we need to define what does it mean to be "related". Both should probably be implemented offline.

Also, regarding countries, regions and any other geographical hierarchies, we learned in our previous projects that geographic questions often adjacent to political, religious and racial questions and disputes. As a civilization we cannot even agree on a list of countries and where they are, as well as their names and flags. It is important to not offend anyone and not to spark any controversies.

The order of things should probably be tweaked more upsteream in the data pipeline, but can also be tweeaked in this post-processing script:

https://github.com/neherlab/flu_frequencies/blob/master/scripts/web_convert.py

And the colors are calculated there as well.

[ArtPoon]

Thanks for the insights @ivan-aksamentov - sounds to me like we can park most of my queries above. Varying point size was addressed in #11 and I will open PRs for any other considerations.