Position Frequency Matrix to Position Weight Matrix, whose colsums need to be 1.

Question

[Zhilong Jia]

In R, Biostrings::PWM can convert the Position Frequency Matrix to Position Weight Matrix (pfm to pwm). but the colsums of pwm is not 1. However, in seqLogo::makePWM request a pwm with colsum is 1. What's the reason or wrong? Is there any other way to convert the pfm to pwm since seqLogo::makePWM is of necessity for me. Thank you.

Update: Code as below.

    library(Biostrings)
    data(HNF4alpha)
    pfm <- consensusMatrix(HNF4alpha)

    #JASPAR_CORE/MA0002.2.pfm
    pfm1 <- c(1387 , 2141,727,1517,56,0,0,62,346,3738,460,0,116
,1630,1060,1506,519,1199,5098,4762,1736,2729,236,0,0,1443
,851,792,884,985,3712,0,0,85,1715,920,4638,5098,3455
,1230,1105,1981,2077,131,0,336,3215,308,204,0,0,84)

    pfm1 <- as.integer(pfm1)
    pfm1 <- matrix(pfm1, nrow=4, ncol=13, byrow = TRUE)
    rownames(pfm1) <- c("A", "C", "G", "T")
    pfm[rownames(pfm1),] <- pfm1

    pwm <- PWM(pfm)
    colSums(pwm)
    ## 0.24534982  0.24245488  0.24187243  0.23899403  0.17464467 -0.15326904 -0.03531437 0.17292782  0.21962851  0.20141431 -0.03056159 -0.15326904  0.18119170

[epaminonda]

Hi, thanks for this. Did you find an answer to the issue above? Also, could you recommend the best way to obtain PWMs from the Jaspar collection of pfms?

Answer 1

[Michael]

Sorry for not picking this up earlier, but if you are still following could you post an example?

I think to convert from a frequency matrix to weight matrix should be simply done by dividing all columns by their colsums. So, it might just be a rounding error, which could be introduced possibly by large colsums, but that is hard to say without example.

[Zhilong Jia]

see update, please. Thank you.

[Ram]

Thank you for the code but Michael and others can help you better if you provide an example, with the actual numbers you see in the PWM and the PFM.

[Zhilong Jia]

@RamRs, @Michael, From the output. It's not the rounding error. Thank you.

Answer 2

[pengchy]

This can be calculated using prop.table function with margin=2

> a <- matrix(1:20,nr=4)
> a
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
[1,]    1    5    9   13   17
[2,]    2    6   10   14   18
[3,]    3    7   11   15   19
[4,]    4    8   12   16   20

> prop.table(a,2)
     [,1]      [,2]      [,3]      [,4]      [,5]
[1,]  0.1 0.1923077 0.2142857 0.2241379 0.2297297
[2,]  0.2 0.2307692 0.2380952 0.2413793 0.2432432
[3,]  0.3 0.2692308 0.2619048 0.2586207 0.2567568
[4,]  0.4 0.3076923 0.2857143 0.2758621 0.2702703