Hitmaps
Hitmaps are a type of data visualization that displays two-dimensional arrays where each cell's color encodes the magnitude of hits, matches, or events associated with the corresponding row and column categories. The coordinates on the axes typically represent discrete categories, such as sequence identifiers, genomic positions, time points, or query-reference pairs. The value in each cell can be a count, a frequency, a p-value, or a normalized score; common practice uses either linear or log-scaled color scales and often a diverging palette when the data center around a meaningful baseline.
Construction involves building a matrix by counting occurrences of hits; apply normalization (per-row, per-column, or global);
Applications are diverse. In genomics, hitmaps visualize where sequence reads or motifs occur along a chromosome
Advantages include an intuitive overview and the ability to reveal cluster structure and relative emphasis across