Reorder columns in heatmap, keep topology

Question

I've generated the following heatmap in R

using the following code.

heatmap(data.matrix(data), col=colorRampPalette(c("yellow", "blue"))(64), labRow=NA, Rowv=NA)

I would like to plot the heatmap with a different column ordering. This column ordering maintains the topology of the dendrogram, so I would like to continue to plot the dendrogram as well. The R help for the heatmap function mentions row and column reordering, and I have tried providing the desired column order as a vector to heatmap 's Colv argument, but this did not work. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The arguments to Colv need to be an ordering passed to the reorder.dendrogram function. It will NOT produce an arbitrary ordering but will impose constraints by virtue of the column dendrogram structure. This should produce a different ordering.

nc <- dim(data.matrix(data)}[2]
heatmap(data.matrix(data), Colv = sample(1:nc),
        col=colorRampPalette(c("yellow", "blue"))(64), 
        labRow=NA, Rowv=NA)