R devel - Apr 2007 - dendrogram definition

Hi,

I'm trying to create a "grob" representing a dendrogram object
(for
use as a legend with lattice), and I have a question regarding how a
"dendrogram" should be interpreted. Are they by definition binary
trees or can they in principle have more than two children?

-Deepayan

>>>>> On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:46:33 -0700,
>>>>> Deepayan Sarkar (DS) wrote:
  > Hi,
  > I'm trying to create a "grob" representing a dendrogram
object (for
  > use as a legend with lattice), and I have a question regarding how a
  > "dendrogram" should be interpreted. Are they by definition
binary
  > trees or can they in principle have more than two children?

They can have more than 2 children, and class "dendrogram" supports
this. However, as most trees are currently created using hclust, all
examples have binary trees.

E.g.,

example(dendrogram)
d3e[[3]]=d3e
attr(d3e,"members")=14
str(d3e)

creates a tree with three branches in the root node (not all
attributes are correct after that brute force operation, so plots will
not look as nice as possible).

Best,
Fritz