I have lots of work need to use heatmap, however I find a problem that sometimes mislead to interpret the data if only by the heatmap visualization. For example,
I have several time points or groups data, the significant differential expression gene from each group should be different.
As, Group A, Group B and Group C,
Group A has significant differential expression gene: aa, bb, cc, dd, ee
Group B has significant differential expression gene: dd, gg, ff, ee, aa,
Group C has significant differential expression gene: tt, uu, ee, aa, dd
When I put them in the same heatmap, which means I need to combine all the gene from all the comparison groups.
All: aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff, gg, tt, uu,
Actually, when I present the data in the heatmap, some of gene as gg, tt, uu, they're have high fold change, but the p-vaule is out of 0.05, they're not the significant differential expression gene in Group A. When I plot, the heatmap will mislead people the gg, tt, uu also have very high expression.
I'm trying to sort the data by the p-value, like gg, tt, uu in the Group A, they're p-vaules are larger than 0.05, so I value their fold change to 0 or NA, but when I plot, the function reports the error as "Error in hclust(d, method = method) :
NA/NaN/Inf in foreign function call (arg 11)".
Any suggestion to figure out this problem? Thank you.