How to adjust margin for axis label from hclust dendogram plot

Question

I have the following code:

hc <- hclust(dist(USArrests), "ave")
plot(hc)
plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="")

Which produce the following plot:

As described in the image above. How can I push they Height label further right?

Answer 1

This can be done using the mgp argument to par :

par(mgp=c(2, 1, 0))
plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="")

par(mgp=c(1, 1, 0))
plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="")

The other two arguments control the tick marks and the scale position so for instance:

par(mgp=c(2, 3, 2))
plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="")

Answer 2

A workaround might be to remove the ylab and just add it as text at appropriate coordinates, like this:

plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="", ylab = "")
text(0, -50, "Height", srt = 90)

Answer 3

Maybe the use of mtext could help

plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="", ylab = "")
mtext(text = "test", side = 2, line = 2)

yielding this plot

side = 2 defines the lefthand side, and line indicates the "excentricity". You can play around some more with the line and adj parameters (and more) like this:

plot(hc, hang = 0.5, sub="", xlab ="", ylab = "")
mtext(text = "t2", side = 2, line = 2, col = "blue")
mtext(text = "t1", side = 2, line = 1, col = "blue")
mtext(text = "t0", side = 2, line = 0, col = "blue")
mtext(text = "tlow", side = 2, line = 0, col = "blue", adj = 0)

yielding the following plot