WGCNA - dendogram: How to interpret alterations of clusters

Question

[christiantd]

Hi all,

I have some questions about how to interpret the dendrogram produced during WGCNA analysis (see example image below)

I have trouble wrapping my head around the sequential appearance of color modules. Intuitively I would expect the colors to come in a sequential order but this is not the case. How does one interpret for example that the blue module appears multiple times along the x axis?

I have tried to read up on this as a similar question has been asked here (https://support.bioconductor.org/p/61501/) but as the documentation is no longer online I cannot fully wrap my head around it.

Any help is much appreciated!

Kind regards,
C

Answer 1

[Kevin Blighe]

The answer to this is elaborated here, by the very author of WGCNA: https://peterlangfelder.com/2018/12/30/why-wgcna-modules-dont-always-agree-with-the-dendrogram/

Kevin