Suppress leaf labels in dendrograms

Question

I'm not an expert in cluster analysis and thus not really familiar with all the "special" contributed packages out there. Hence, I just used base routines as the did here for a quick example I was asked to produce.

The problem is that my dataset has roughly 7800 observations and thus the leaf labels are by far too manifold and clutter up the whole x-axis. So, how can I suppress the plotting of the labels? I'm guessing there must be some "exotic" parameter accessible via par() that controls this?

Answer 1

See the help for hclust

?hclust

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

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