Get colors for your heatmap annotation

This post will show how to configure quickly the colors for the annotation of rows/columns that go on top or on the side of a heatmap.

I normally use pheatmap a lot. Recently I discovered ComplexHeatmap. In both cases I spend always sometime changing the colors of the annotations. I ended up coding a function inside my package DEGreport to do that.

Given a data.frame with metadata data information will do:

  • white-black scale for numerical variables
  • blue-orange for categorical values with only two categories
  • Set2 palette for categorical values with more than two categories

All three color sets can be changed using the parameters function.

library(DEGreport)
library(stemHypoxia)
data(stemHypoxia)

I am going to use this stemcell experiment dataset I found randomly in Bioconductor page.

exp = as.matrix(M[,3:30])
rownames(exp) = M[,2]
rownames(design) = colnames(exp)
design = design[,c(1:2)]
design$time = as.factor(design$time)

I’ll find the most variable genes.

most_variable = names(tail(sort(apply(exp, 1, sd)), 1000))
design$mean_gene = colMeans(exp[most_variable,])

And we can plot the heatmap with new colors with need to specify each variable at a time.

library(pheatmap)
pheatmap(exp[most_variable,], scale = "row", show_rownames = FALSE,
         annotation_col = design,
         annotation_colors = degColors(design))

If you use ComplexHeatmap you can activate col_fun = TRUE to get it working.

  • R Session
devtools::session_info()
## Warning: 'DESCRIPTION' file has an 'Encoding' field and re-encoding is not
## possible

## Session info -------------------------------------------------------------

##  setting  value
##  version  R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02)
##  system   x86_64, darwin15.6.0
##  ui       X11
##  language (EN)
##  collate  en_US.UTF-8
##  tz       America/New_York
##  date     2018-09-21

## Packages -----------------------------------------------------------------

##  package              * version   date       source
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##  annotate               1.58.0    2018-05-01 cran (@1.58.0)
##  AnnotationDbi          1.42.1    2018-05-08 Bioconductor
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##  base                 * 3.5.1     2018-07-05 local
##  base64enc              0.1-3     2015-07-28 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  bindr                  0.1.1     2018-03-13 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  bindrcpp               0.2.2     2018-03-29 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  BiocGenerics           0.26.0    2018-05-01 Bioconductor
##  BiocParallel           1.14.2    2018-07-08 cran (@1.14.2)
##  bit                    1.1-14    2018-05-29 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  bit64                  0.9-7     2017-05-08 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  blob                   1.1.1     2018-03-25 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  broom                  0.5.0     2018-07-17 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  checkmate              1.8.5     2017-10-24 cran (@1.8.5)
##  circlize               0.4.4     2018-06-10 cran (@0.4.4)
##  cluster                2.0.7-1   2018-04-13 CRAN (R 3.5.1)
##  colorspace             1.3-2     2016-12-14 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  compiler               3.5.1     2018-07-05 local
##  ComplexHeatmap         1.18.1    2018-06-19 cran (@1.18.1)
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##  cowplot                0.9.3     2018-07-15 cran (@0.9.3)
##  crayon                 1.3.4     2017-09-16 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  DEGreport            * 1.17.5    2018-09-04 local (lpantano/DEGreport@NA)
##  DelayedArray           0.6.5     2018-08-15 cran (@0.6.5)
##  DESeq2                 1.20.0    2018-05-01 Bioconductor
##  devtools               1.13.6    2018-06-27 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  dplyr                  0.7.6     2018-06-29 CRAN (R 3.5.1)
##  edgeR                  3.22.3    2018-06-21 cran (@3.22.3)
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##  Formula                1.2-3     2018-05-03 cran (@1.2-3)
##  genefilter             1.62.0    2018-05-01 cran (@1.62.0)
##  geneplotter            1.58.0    2018-05-01 cran (@1.58.0)
##  GenomeInfoDb           1.16.0    2018-05-01 cran (@1.16.0)
##  GenomeInfoDbData       1.1.0     2018-08-31 Bioconductor
##  GenomicRanges          1.32.6    2018-07-20 cran (@1.32.6)
##  GetoptLong             0.1.7     2018-06-10 cran (@0.1.7)
##  ggdendro               0.1-20    2016-04-27 cran (@0.1-20)
##  ggplot2                3.0.0     2018-07-03 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  ggrepel                0.8.0     2018-05-09 cran (@0.8.0)
##  GlobalOptions          0.1.0     2018-06-09 cran (@0.1.0)
##  glue                   1.3.0     2018-07-17 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  graphics             * 3.5.1     2018-07-05 local
##  grDevices            * 3.5.1     2018-07-05 local
##  grid                   3.5.1     2018-07-05 local
##  gridExtra              2.3       2017-09-09 cran (@2.3)
##  gtable                 0.2.0     2016-02-26 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
##  Hmisc                  4.1-1     2018-01-03 cran (@4.1-1)
##  htmlTable              1.12      2018-05-26 cran (@1.12)
##  htmltools              0.3.6     2017-04-28 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  limma                  3.36.3    2018-08-25 cran (@3.36.3)
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##  methods              * 3.5.1     2018-07-05 local
##  mnormt                 1.5-5     2016-10-15 cran (@1.5-5)
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##  Nozzle.R1              1.1-1     2013-05-15 cran (@1.1-1)
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##  reshape                0.8.7     2017-08-06 cran (@0.8.7)
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##  rlang                  0.2.2     2018-08-16 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  rstudioapi             0.7       2017-09-07 CRAN (R 3.5.0)
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##  stemHypoxia          * 1.16.0    2018-09-21 Bioconductor
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##  SummarizedExperiment   1.10.1    2018-05-11 Bioconductor
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Director of Bioinformatics Platform

My research interests include genomics, visualizationa and modelling.

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