Change label size of Cluster Dendrogram in R 3.01

Jonathan Mulligan picture Jonathan Mulligan · Jun 21, 2013 · Viewed 20.8k times · Source

Has anybody found a workaround to the apparent bug in R 3 which prohibits changing the label size on a Cluster Dendrogram?

The following code used to work fine before updating R to 3.01 (prior version was 2.15 I think):

plot(hclust, labels = data[, 1], cex = 0.3)

Now there is no change to label size when altering the cex argument.

Answer

Jean V. Adams picture Jean V. Adams · Jun 21, 2013

You could set the cex parameter using the par() function before the call to plot(). For example:

# example from ?hclust
hc <- hclust(dist(USArrests), "ave")

# default label size
plot(hc, xlab="xlab", ylab="ylab", main="main", sub="")

# reduced label size
par(cex=0.3, mar=c(5, 8, 4, 1))
plot(hc, xlab="", ylab="", main="", sub="", axes=FALSE)
par(cex=1)
title(xlab="xlab", ylab="ylab", main="main")
axis(2)