R corrplot change data labels

Question

I am using R corrplot library. It looks amazing, however to produce a really good plot I want to change the labels of rows and columns of the correlation matrix.

On

Answer 1

In the current corrplot version 0.75, you cannot use labels parameter because the X and Y labels are computed within the corrplot() function from colnames() and rownames() of the input corr matrix.

I'm using similar approach as you have suggested:

M <- cor(mtcars)
colnames(M) <- c("a", "set", "of", "x", "labels", 1:6)
corrplot(M, method = "color")

BTW, I linked this stackoverflow question from our github issue tracker: https://github.com/taiyun/corrplot/issues/20

UPDATE: In the current corrplot version 0.78, also plotmath expressions are allowed in variable names. Just prefix your name with one of the characters ":", "=" or "$".

Example:

M <- cor(mtcars)[1:5,1:5]
colnames(M) <- c("alpha", "beta", ":alpha+beta", ":a[0]", "=a[beta]")
rownames(M) <- c("alpha", "beta", NA, "$a[0]", "$ a[beta]")
corrplot(M)