What techniques exists in R to visualize a “distance matrix”?

Question

I wish to present a distance matrix in an article I am writing, and I am looking for good visualization for it.

So far I came across balloon plots (I used it here, b

Answer 1

You could also use force-directed graph drawing algorithms to visualize a distance matrix, e.g.

nba <- read.csv("http://datasets.flowingdata.com/ppg2008.csv")
dist_m <- as.matrix(dist(nba[1:20, -1]))
dist_mi <- 1/dist_m # one over, as qgraph takes similarity matrices as input
library(qgraph)
jpeg('example_forcedraw.jpg', width=1000, height=1000, unit='px')
qgraph(dist_mi, layout='spring', vsize=3)
dev.off()