Chapter 1 Downloading and installing the package

The superheat package was developed to produce customizable and extendable heatmaps which act as a tool for the visual exploration of complex datasets. Superheat enhances the traditional heatmap by providing a platform to visualize a wide range of data types simultaneously, adding to the heatmap a response variable as a scatterplot, model results as boxplots, correlation information as barplots, text information, and more. Superheat allows the user to explore their data to greater depths and to take advantage of the heterogeneity present in the data to inform analysis decisions.

The goal of this guide is to help you understand how to use the superheat package in R to visualize your data. First, you need to download and install the package. This can be done using the devtools package. If you have not yet done so, you will need to install it by simply typing the following code into your R console:

Next, load the superheat library into your workspace: