Creating your first heat map in R (Simple)

In this recipe, we will learn how to construct our first heat map in R from the AirPassenger data set, which is a standard data set included in the data package that is available with R distributions. For this task, we will use the levelplot() function from the lattice package and explore the enhanced features of the gplots package, the heatmap.2() function.

The following image shows one of the heat maps that we are going to create in this recipe from the total count of air passengers: