# Text and tabular reports¶

## breaks¶

List the targeted genes in which a segmentation breakpoint occurs.

cnvkit.py breaks Sample.cnr Sample.cns


This helps to identify genes in which (a) an unbalanced fusion or other structural rearrangement breakpoint occured, or (b) CNV calling is simply difficult due to an inconsistent copy number signal.

## gainloss¶

Identify targeted genes with copy number gain or loss above or below a threshold.

cnvkit.py gainloss Sample.cnr
cnvkit.py gainloss Sample.cnr -s Sample.cns -t 0.4 -y -m 5


If segments are given, the log2 ratio value reported for each gene will be the value of the segment covering the gene. Where more than one segment overlaps the gene, i.e. if the gene contains a breakpoint, each segment’s value will be reported as a separate row for the same gene.

If segments are not given, the median of the log2 ratio values of the bins within each gene will be reported as the gene’s overall log2 ratio value. This mode will not attempt to identify breakpoints within genes.

The threshold (-t) and minimum number of bins (-m) options are used to control which genes are reported. For example, a threshold of .6 (the default) will report single-copy gains and losses in a completely pure tumor sample (or germline CNVs), but a lower threshold would be necessary to call somatic CNAs if significant normal-cell contamination is present. Some likely false positives can be eliminated by dropping CNVs that cover a small number of bins (e.g. with -m 3, genes where only 1 or 2 bins show copy number change will not be reported), at the risk of missing some true positives.

Specify the reference gender (-y if male) to ensure CNVs on the X and Y chromosomes are reported correctly; otherwise, a large number of spurious gains or losses on the sex chromosomes may be reported.

The output is a text table of tab-separated values, which is amenable to further processing by scripts and standard Unix tools such as grep, sort, cut and awk.

## gender¶

Guess samples’ gender from the relative coverage of chromoxsome X. A table of the sample name (derived from the filename), guessed chromosomal gender (string “Female” or “Male”), and log2 ratio value of chromosome X is printed.

cnvkit.py gender *.cnn *.cnr *.cns
cnvkit.py gender -y *.cnn *.cnr *.cns


## metrics¶

Calculate the spread of bin-level copy ratios from the corresponding final segments using several statistics. These statistics help quantify how “noisy” a sample is and help to decide which samples to exclude from an analysis, or to select normal samples for a reference copy number profile.

For a single sample:

cnvkit.py metrics Sample.cnr -s Sample.cns


(Note that the order of arguments and options matters here, unlike the other commands: Everything after the -s flag is treated as a segment dataset.)

Multiple samples can be processed together to produce a table:

cnvkit.py metrics S1.cnr S2.cnr -s S1.cns S2.cns
cnvkit.py metrics *.cnr -s *.cns


Several bin-level log2 ratio estimates for a single sample, such as the uncorrected on- and off-target coverages and the final bin-level log2 ratios, can be compared to the same final segmentation (reusing the given segments for each coverage dataset):

cnvkit.py metrics Sample.targetcoverage.cnn Sample.antitargetcoverage.cnn Sample.cnr -s Sample.cns


In each case, given the bin-level copy ratios (.cnr) and segments (.cns) for a sample, the log2 ratio value of each segment is subtracted from each of the bins it covers, and several estimators of spread are calculated from the residual values. The output text or table shows for each sample:

• Total number of segments (in the .cns file) – a large number of segments can indicate that the sample has either many real CNAs, or noisy coverage and therefore many spurious segments.
• Uncorrected sample standard deviation – this measure is prone to being inflated by a few outliers, such as may occur in regions of poor coverage or if the targets used with CNVkit analysis did not exactly match the capture. (Also note that the log2 ratio data are not quite normally distributed.) However, if a sample’s standard deviation is drastically higher than the other estimates shown by the metrics command, that helpfully indicates the sample has some outlier bins.
• Median absolute deviation (MAD) – very robust against outliers, but less statistically efficient.
• Interquartile range (IQR) – another robust measure that is easy to understand.
• Tukey’s biweight midvariance – a robust and efficient measure of spread.

Note that many small segments will fit noisy data better, shrinking the residuals used to calculate the other estimates of spread, even if many of the segments are spurious. One possible heuristic for judging the overall noisiness of each sample in a table is to multiply the number of segments by the biweight midvariance – the value will tend to be higher for unreliable samples. Check questionable samples for poor coverage (using e.g. bedtools, chanjo, IGV or Picard CalculateHsMetrics).

Finally, visualizing a sample with CNVkit’s scatter command will often make it apparent whether a sample or the copy ratios within a genomic region can be trusted.