3 min read

A completely customized annotation

For most annotation functions implemented in ComplexHeatmap, they only draw one same type of annotation graphics, e.g. anno_points() only draws points. From ComplexHeatmap version 2.9.4, I added a new annotation function anno_customize(), with which you can completely freely define graphics for every annotation cell.

The input for anno_customize() should be a categorical vector.

library(ComplexHeatmap)
x = c("a", "a", "a", "b", "b", "b", "c", "c", "d", "d")

For each level, you need to define a graphics function for it.

graphics = list(
    "a" = function(x, y, w, h) grid.rect(x, y, w*0.8, h*0.33, gp = gpar(fill = "red")),
    "b" = function(x, y, w, h) grid.text("A", x, y, gp = gpar(col = "darkgreen")),
    "c" = function(x, y, w, h) grid.points(x, y, gp = gpar(col = "orange"), pch = 16),
    "d" = function(x, y, w, h) {
        img = png::readPNG(system.file("extdata", "Rlogo.png", package = "circlize"))
        grid.raster(img, x, y, width = unit(0.8, "snpc"), height = unit(0.8, "snpc")*nrow(img)/ncol(img))
    }
)

When adding graphics, each annotation cell is an independent viewport, thus, the self-defined graphics function accepts four arguments: x and y: the center of the viewport of the annotation cell, w and h: the width and height of the viewport. In the example above, we set a horizontal bar for "a", a text for "b", a point for "c" and an image for "d".

Then we add this new annotation to both row and column of the heatmap, just in the same way as normal annotations.

m = matrix(rnorm(100), 10)
Heatmap(m, 
    top_annotation = HeatmapAnnotation(foo = anno_customize(x, graphics = graphics)),
    right_annotation = rowAnnotation(bar = anno_customize(x, graphics = graphics)))

Reordering and splitting are automatically adjusted.

Heatmap(m, 
    top_annotation = HeatmapAnnotation(foo = anno_customize(x, graphics = graphics)),
    right_annotation = rowAnnotation(bar = anno_customize(x, graphics = graphics)),
    column_split = x, row_split = x)

Legend() function also accepts a graphics argument, so it is easy to add legends for the “customized annotations”.

m = matrix(rnorm(100), 10)
ht = Heatmap(m, 
    top_annotation = HeatmapAnnotation(foo = anno_customize(x, graphics = graphics)))
lgd = Legend(title = "foo", at = names(graphics), graphics = graphics)
draw(ht, annotation_legend_list = lgd)

Session info

sessionInfo()
## R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
## Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
## Running under: macOS Big Sur 10.16
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/lib/libRblas.dylib
## LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
## 
## locale:
## [1] C/UTF-8/C/C/C/C
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
## [8] base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] ComplexHeatmap_2.9.4 knitr_1.33          
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] Rcpp_1.0.7          highr_0.9           bslib_0.3.0        
##  [4] compiler_4.1.0      RColorBrewer_1.1-2  jquerylib_0.1.4    
##  [7] iterators_1.0.13    tools_4.1.0         digest_0.6.27      
## [10] clue_0.3-59         jsonlite_1.7.2      evaluate_0.14      
## [13] png_0.1-7           rlang_0.4.11        foreach_1.5.1      
## [16] magick_2.7.2        yaml_2.2.1          parallel_4.1.0     
## [19] blogdown_0.20       xfun_0.24           fastmap_1.1.0      
## [22] cluster_2.1.2       stringr_1.4.0       sass_0.4.0         
## [25] GlobalOptions_0.1.2 S4Vectors_0.30.0    IRanges_2.26.0     
## [28] stats4_4.1.0        R6_2.5.0            GetoptLong_1.0.3   
## [31] rmarkdown_2.9       bookdown_0.22       magrittr_2.0.1     
## [34] codetools_0.2-18    htmltools_0.5.2     matrixStats_0.59.0 
## [37] BiocGenerics_0.38.0 shape_1.4.6         colorspace_2.0-2   
## [40] circlize_0.4.14     stringi_1.6.2       doParallel_1.0.16  
## [43] crayon_1.4.1        rjson_0.2.20