A physically inspired approach to coarse-graining transcriptomes reveals the dynamics of aging
Fig 2
All ellipsis represent the same system, such as a tissue, an organ, or several organs. Small areas segmented by solid lines represent single cells. Every gene has an expression distribution across all cells as per ellipse, and the color codes for the expression level. At step 0, the data is the normalized single-cell atlas. At each following step, maximally correlated variables get paired to produce a coarse-grained metagene then the second maximally correlated pairs. The procedure is iterated until only one gene is left where we cannot coarse grain further.