Suppress leaf marks in dendrograms

Question

I am not an expert in cluster analysis and, therefore, am not very familiar with all the “special” packages. Therefore, I simply used the basic procedures, as I did here for the quick example that I was asked to produce.

The problem is that my dataset has approximately 7800 observations, and therefore the leaf marks are too diverse and clutter the entire X axis. So, how can I suppress sticky labels? I suppose there should be some kind of “exotic” parameter available via par() that controls this?

Answer 1

See help for hclust

 ?hclust 

There you will see an explanation of the labels argument: "If labels = FALSE no labels are drawn." Using the example from the help file,

 hc <- hclust(dist(USArrests), "ave") plot(hc, labels=FALSE)