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Statistics

Statistics require a license.

The statistics table lists every population in your gate hierarchy and recomputes as gates change — move a boundary and watch the frequency settle rather than guessing where it belongs.

The single most important thing on this page — and the table answers it explicitly rather than making you infer it.

Every population gets two frequency columns:

  • % of Total — the population as a fraction of all events in the file
  • % of Parent — the population as a fraction of the gate it sits inside

Read the column, not the tree. A cytometrist scanning a hierarchy naturally reads every number as a percentage of its parent, and a tree that mixes denominators is the most common way a flow figure misleads. Two labelled columns is the fix: you never have to work out which denominator a number is using.

This matters most when you are comparing a population against a published figure. “CD4⁺ is 40%” means completely different things as a fraction of all events versus as a fraction of CD3⁺ cells — and a five-fold discrepancy with the literature is usually a denominator mismatch rather than a gating error.

If a number still surprises you, check the breadcrumb above the plot to confirm which population you are inside. See drill-down.

  • Count — events inside the gate
  • % of Total and % of Parent — see above
  • Per-channel statistics — central tendency and spread for each parameter within the population

Per-channel statistics are computed on the population, so a median fluorescence intensity for CD4⁺ cells is over CD4⁺ cells only.

A matrix of how parameters covary across events. Useful for two things:

  • Spotting compensation problems. Two channels that should be independent but correlate strongly are a spillover hint.
  • Panel sanity. Markers that should co-express, do.

Statistics can be computed across many files at once, giving one table with a row per sample rather than a per-file hunt. See Batch and specialised analysis.

Statistics export as CSV. See Exporting.

Export the compensation matrix and the gate strategy along with the numbers. A statistics table on its own does not record how it was produced.

Some AI-related figures inside the app are computed on a subsample rather than on every event, for speed. Where that is the case the app says so. The statistics table is not subsampled — it is computed over the population.