This function utilizes ggplot2 (Wickham, 2009) to visualize a matrix as a heatmap: a false color plot in which the
individual matrix entries are represented by colors. lowColor
determines the color scale for matrix entries in the negative range.
highColor
determines the color scale for matrix entries in the positive range. For the colors supported
by the arguments lowColor
and highColor
, see https://stat.columbia.edu/~tzheng/files/Rcolor.pdf. White entries in the plot
represent the midscale value of 0. One can opt to set the diagonal entries to the midscale color of white when one is interested in
(heatmapping) the off-diagonal elements only. To achieve this, set diag = FALSE
. Naturally, the diag
argument is only
used when the input matrix M
is a square matrix.
The intended use of the function is to visualize a, possibly sparsified, precision matrix as a heatmap. The function may also be
used, in a graphical modeling setting, to assess the performance of edge selection techniques. However, the function is quite general,
in the sense that it can represent any matrix
as a heatmap.