Labelling circular dendextend dendrogram

Question

I'm trying to plot a circular dendrogram of compositional data. Using the following code:

library(dendextend)
library(circlize)
library(compositions)
data("Hydrochem")
hydro<-Hydrochem

d <- dist(hydro[7:19], method="euclidean") 
hc <- hclust(d, method = "average")
dend <- as.dendrogram(hc)
hydro$River <- as.character(hydro$River)
labels(dend) <- hydro$River[order.dendrogram(dend)]
plot(dend)

I can get a normal dendrogram of what I want with the correct label orders.

But when I run circlize_dendrogram(dend), I get this:

What's vexing me is the dendrogram in the middle - when I don't use the order of the dendrogram for the labels (i.e. just typing labels(dend) <- hydro$River), the inner dendrogram is fine and everything looks great.

I've tried altering the labels_track_height and dend_track_height settings to no avail, and when I run the same process on smaller toy datasets this issue doesn't arise.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

So you actually have two problems surfacing in your code: 1. The labels are not unique. 2. The plot does not give enough room for the labels, after you've updated them in the dendrogram object

The first problem can be solved by adding numbers to the non-unique labels you supply, thus making them unique. The solution for the second problem is to play with the labels_track_height argument in the circlize_dendrogram function. Here is the updated code (notice the last line, where the difference is):

library(dendextend)
library(circlize)
library(compositions)
data("Hydrochem")
hydro<-Hydrochem

d <- dist(hydro[7:19], method="euclidean") 
hc <- hclust(d, method = "average")
dend <- as.dendrogram(hc)

tmp <- as.character(hydro$River)[order.dendrogram(dend)]
labels(dend) <- paste0(seq_along(tmp), "_", tmp)
plot(dend)
circlize_dendrogram(dend, labels_track_height  = 0.4)

The output you get is this:

(This is now done automatically in dendextend 1.6.0, currently available on github - and later on also on CRAN)