what's the meaning of a Concordance at the Top plot(CAT plot)

Question

[Ada]

I read a paper svaseq: removing batch effects and other unwanted noise from sequencing data and it has a plot called "A Concordance at the Top plot" ,But I don't google any introduction of the CAT plot except a package called ffpe which has a function for making CAT plot , and I don't know the advantage of CAT plot,why the author choose CAT plot to visualize ?Is there anyone can tell me and give me some tips? Thanks a lot ! this is what is CAT plot look like

Answer 1

[Michael Love]

The reference points to here:

http://biostats.bepress.com/jhubiostat/paper71/

At this link you can pull up the PDF and see Figure 2.

In the text you have:

To account for this fact we introduce a new descriptive plot: the correspondence at the top (CAT) plot. To create the CAT plot we rank genes by log fold change using two different measurements. We then create lists of candidate genes for a range of list sizes. CAT curves show the proportion of genes in common plotted against the size of the lists.

I've also used these plots when I have multiple proposed rankings, and then a "true" ranking (either gold-standard measurement or known from simulation). The x-axis is the size of the list (how many "top" genes), and the y-axis is the size of the intersection between a proposed ranking and the "true" ranking.