Pheatmap error: 'gpar' element 'fill' must not be length 0 , what to do about that in an assymmetrical matrix

Question

[emil.bb]

Hi there,

I'm trying to create a pheatmap with annotationcolors based on groups. I'm an sociologist, so this might not be the common way to use pheatmap, but I found it to be great at displaying social groups as well. But,, when I try to plot an assymmetrical matrix, where the rows and columns do not match, I get an error:

Error in check.length("fill") : 
  'gpar' element 'fill' must not be length 0

The issue is also tackled here, but as I understand it, the solution is to make sure rownames and colnames are identical. Which isn't possible for my purpose.

here is an reproducible example:

DAT <- matrix(c(
771,1176,1018,1042,275,949,823,1250,348,622,1244,
465,984,766,790,573,784,592,1250,1222,421,1103,
171,288,194,80,547,528,249,959,72,81,224,
132,122,90,50,44,206,127,108,52,59,144,
0,9,5,9,0,10,17,0,0,0,0),
           nrow = 5, ncol = 11, byrow = TRUE)

group <-  c("grp1","grp2","grp3","grp4","grp5","grp6","grp7","grp8","grp9","grp9","grp9")

annotation_c <- as.data.frame(group)

colnames(DAT) <- paste(group," ", "no.",seq_len(11),sep="")
rownames(DAT) <- paste(rep(c("grp"),5),91:95,sep="_")

# annotation_r <- as.data.frame(rownames(DAT))

pheatmap::pheatmap(DAT, color = colorRampPalette(rev(brewer.pal(n = 7, name = "RdYlBu")))(length(seq_len(10))), cluster_cols=FALSE,cluster_rows=FALSE ,  
    annotation_col=annotation_c)

Thank you for your time,
Emil

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

From this other post you refer to, it seems you also need the grid package installed. Did you do that ? If really symmetry is a problem with pheatmap, there are plenty of R functions/packages for heatmaps. For example, both heatmap() and heatmap.2() have a symm parameter to indicate whether the matrix is symmetric.

Answer 1

[e.rempel]

I added rownames to the annotation_c data frame

rownames(annotation_c) <- colnames(DAT)

and your script worked.