  The technological advancements of the modern era have enabled the collection
of huge amounts of data in science and beyond. Extracting useful information
from such massive datasets is an ongoing challenge as traditional data
visualization tools typically do not scale well in high-dimensional settings.
An existing visualization technique that is particularly well suited to
visualizing large datasets is the heatmap. Although heatmaps are extremely
popular in fields such as bioinformatics for visualizing large gene expression
datasets, they remain a severely underutilized visualization tool in modern
data analysis. In this paper we introduce superheat, a new R package that
provides an extremely flexible and customizable platform for visualizing large
datasets using extendable heatmaps. Superheat enhances the traditional heatmap
by providing a platform to visualize a wide range of data types simultaneously,
adding to the heatmap a response variable as a scatterplot, model results as
boxplots, correlation information as barplots, text information, and more.
Superheat allows the user to explore their data to greater depths and to take
advantage of the heterogeneity present in the data to inform analysis
decisions. The goal of this paper is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate the potential
of the heatmap as a default visualization method for a wide range of data types
using reproducible examples, and (2) to highlight the customizability and ease
of implementation of the superheat package in R for creating beautiful and
extendable heatmaps. The capabilities and fundamental applicability of the
superheat package will be explored via three case studies, each based on
publicly available data sources and accompanied by a file outlining the
step-by-step analytic pipeline (with code).
