11
votes

Which package is best for a heatmap/image with sorting on rows only, but don't show any dendrogram or other visual clutter (just a 2D colored grid with automatic named labels on both axes). I don't need fancy clustering beyond basic numeric sorting. The data is a 39x10 table of numerics in the range (0,0.21) which I want to visualize.

I searched SO (see this) and the R sites, and tried a few out. Check out R Graphical Manual to see an excellent searchable list of screenshots and corresponding packages.

The range of packages is confusing - which one is the preferred heatmap (like ggplot2 is for most other plotting)? Here is what I found out so far:

base::heatmap is annoying, even with args heatmap(..., Colv=NA, keep.dendro=FALSE) it still plots the unwanted dendrogram on rows.

For now I'm going with pheatmap(..., cluster_cols=FALSE, cluster_rows=FALSE) and manually presorting my table, like this guy: Order of rows in heatmap?

Addendum: to display the value inside each cell, see: display a matrix, including the values, as a heatmap . I didn't need that but it's nice-to-have.

2
I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. Are you asking how to make a heatmap in ggplot? If so, you need to use geom_tile() - Andrie
@Andrie: I'm just asking which package you all recommend (how do I get sorting without clustering? and no dendrograms?). I didn't think ggplot2 could do heatmaps, but after you mention geom_tile I found that learnr article. - smci
If you just want to sort, why not use sort()? - Andrie
(I know how to sort manually, but I thought we could get that for free with some of the heatmap fns.) Regardless, which package do you recommend for my use case? - smci
I would cluster using hclust or kmeans, or alternatively just sort, then plot using ggplot2. - Andrie

2 Answers

6
votes

With pheatmap you can use options treeheight_row and treeheight_col and set these to 0.

1
votes

just another option you have not mentioned...package bipartite as it is as simple as you say

library(bipartite)
mat<-matrix(c(1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3),byrow=TRUE,nrow=3)
rownames(mat)<-c("a","b","c")
colnames(mat)<-c("a","b","c")
visweb(mat,type="nested")