visxhclust: An R Shiny package for visual exploration of hierarchical clustering

Abstract

visxhclust is an R Shiny (Chang et al., 2021) web app that facilitates iterative exploration of hierarchical clustering. The package assembles together the outputs of different steps of a clustering workflow in a fluid visual analytics (Keim et al., 2008) interface, enabling analysts to change selected features and hyperparameters and quickly re-evaluate results. It focuses on hierarchical clustering, a widely used method that is often chosen due to the familiarity of analysts with the tree-like structure of results presented as dendrograms and its frequent combination with visualization techniques such as heatmaps. Package reference and an illustrated tutorial are available online.