What's That Smell? New Research Sniffs Out Odor Categories with Math (IMAGE)

PLOS

What's That Smell? New Research Sniffs Out Odor Categories with Math

Caption

Properties of the perceptual basis set W. (A) Plot of normalized odor descriptor amplitude vs. odor descriptor number for the basis vector W1. Each point along the x-axis corresponds to a single odor descriptor, and the amplitude of each descriptor indicates the descriptor's relevance to the shown perceptual basis vector. Colored circles show the seven largest points in the basis vector, and descriptors corresponding to these points are listed to the right. (B) Waterfall plot of the 10 basis vectors constituting W, used in subsequent analyses. Note that each vector contains many values close to or equal to zero.

Credit

Castro JB, Ramanathan A, Chennubhotla CS (2013) Categorical Dimensions of Human Odor Descriptor Space Revealed by Non-Negative Matrix Factorization. PLoS ONE 8(9): e73289. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073289

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