FED3Viz cumulative food intake, grouped

[Renée Poelman]

Dear,

I've started to analyse my FED3 data using FED3Viz (exciting!).

I have 2 groups: one experimental and one control group. 

I would like to plot the cumulative food intake (preferable in grams) as one average plot per group, which looks something like this: (excel graph). 

Because it is quite a simple plot, I expected to be able to make this using FED3Viz. I have created groups from individual FED documents, but then I seem to be doing something wrong. I have red and re-red the FED3Viz manual several times and looked through the FED3 forum but my plot seems to always come out one of two ways:

- when I use single pellet plot I get an individual graph for each mouse, not grouped

- when I select the groups and use multi pellet plot I get all mice in one graph, but they are still individual plots:

  

I attached a screenshot of my settings tab to this e-mail.

My question is now: How can I use FED3Viz to average and plot my groups in one graph?

Kind regards,

Renée Poelman

[Lex Kravitz]

Hi Renée,

Thanks for your detailed question.  Unfortunately FED3Viz does not have a "cumulative" plot option for group average plots.  If you click on "Average Pellet Plot" you will get a *non-cumulative* average pellet plot like this, which may be helpful but is not exactly what you are looking for:  

To create a cumulative plot of pellet intake you will need to move the data to Python.  FED3Viz can help you do this in 2 ways:

1. You can click "Save Plot Data" to the left of the plot to obtain a .csv file containing your data, binned and aligned as you see in the plot.  You can then import this .csv file into Python (or Excel, Prism, etc) and remake the plot the way you want, including transforming the units from "pellets" to "grams", and creating cumulative records.
2. Alternatively, you can click "Plot Code" and a text box will pop up with all of the code needed to re-create the plot you see in FED3Viz in Python.  You can then do your tweaks in Python, using this code as a starting point.  Feel free to write back here if you have questions on this. 
   

Hope this helps, or at least clears up why you couldn't find the plot you wanted!  -Lex