TreeAndLeaf: an R/Bioconductor package for graphs and trees with focus on the leaves

Abstract

Motivation: Dendrogram is a classical diagram for visualizing binary trees. Although efficient to represent hierarchical relations, it provides limited space for displaying information on the leaf elements, especially for large trees.

Results: Here, we present TreeAndLeaf, an R/Bioconductor package that implements a hybrid layout strategy to represent tree diagrams with focus on the leaves. The TreeAndLeaf package combines force-directed graph and tree layout algorithms using a single visualization system, allowing projection of multiple layers of information onto a graph-tree diagram. The Supplementary Information provides two case studies that use breast cancer data from epidemiological and experimental studies.

Availability and implementation: TreeAndLeaf is written in the R language, and is available from the Bioconductor project at http://bioconductor.org/packages/TreeAndLeaf/ (version≥1.4.2).

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.