R help - Jun 2006 - making matrix monotonous

Dear all,

I'm currently working on correlation matrix.
The function image() is quite useful for visualization.

Before using image(), I'd like to sort the matrix rows/columns,
in order to make the matrix the more monotonous/smooth possible.

Before reinventing the wheel, is there somebody here aware if
such a function already exists ?

Thanks.

I agree it would be great to sort the variables in a correlation 
matrix to make it easier to read and see patterns.  I don't know any 
functions for doing that.  If it were my problem, I might "order" the 
variables by their first principal component.  There may also be some 
cluster analysis way to do that, but I don't know it well enough to say.

	  Hope this helps.
	  Spencer Graves

vincent at 7d4.com wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I'm currently working on correlation matrix.
> The function image() is quite useful for visualization.
> 
> Before using image(), I'd like to sort the matrix rows/columns,
> in order to make the matrix the more monotonous/smooth possible.
> 
> Before reinventing the wheel, is there somebody here aware if
> such a function already exists ?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
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Thanks to everybody for your help.
Thanks for the coding improvements
and thanks for the very interesting paper.