How to change color scheme in corrplot

LaTeXFan picture LaTeXFan · Jun 10, 2015 · Viewed 22.2k times · Source

I am using corrplot in R to visualise a correlation-coefficient matrix as follows.

library(corrplot) 
library(datasets)
corrplot(abs(cor(mtcars)), method="color", tl.pos="n", cl.lim = c(0,1))

enter image description here

The default colour scheme is blue-based. However, I would like to change it to red-based. I know I need to use colorRampPalette to specify colours I want. However, I could not figure out what colour codes to use. Could anyone help me with this, please?

Thank you!

Answer

MrFlick picture MrFlick · Jun 10, 2015

If you want to use red, you can define your own colorRampPalette as you've alread mentioned. Just note that the plot seems to set the range of colors from -1 to 1 (even if you adjust the cl.lim value). Thus you still need to define colors for the -1 to 0 range in your ramp. For example

corrplot(abs(cor(mtcars)), method="color", tl.pos="n", 
    cl.lim=c(0,1), col=colorRampPalette(c("blue","white","red"))(200))

will produce

enter image description here

and even though we defined "blue" in the color palette, it doesn't show up because we limited the color bar to values greater than 1.

This "unused" part of the color gradient cab be seen with the original version as well if you take out cl.lim

corrplot(abs(cor(mtcars)), method="color", tl.pos="n")

enter image description here