17 research outputs found
Visual Similarity Perception of Directed Acyclic Graphs: A Study on Influencing Factors
While visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is commonly
encountered in various disciplines (e.g., finance, biology), knowledge about
humans' perception of graph similarity is currently quite limited. By graph
similarity perception we mean how humans perceive commonalities and differences
in graphs and herewith come to a similarity judgment. As a step toward filling
this gap the study reported in this paper strives to identify factors which
influence the similarity perception of DAGs. In particular, we conducted a
card-sorting study employing a qualitative and quantitative analysis approach
to identify 1) groups of DAGs that are perceived as similar by the participants
and 2) the reasons behind their choice of groups. Our results suggest that
similarity is mainly influenced by the number of levels, the number of nodes on
a level, and the overall shape of the graph.Comment: Graph Drawing 2017 - arXiv Version; Keywords: Graphs, Perception,
Similarity, Comparison, Visualizatio
Proximity, Communities, and Attributes in Social Network Visualisation
The identification of groups in social networks drawn as graphs is an important task for social scientists whowish to know how a population divides with respect to relationships or attributes. Community detection algorithms identify communities (groups) in social networks by finding clusters in the graph: that is, sets of people (nodes) where the relationships (edges) between them are more numerous than their relationships with other nodes. This approach to determining communities is naturally based on the underlying structure of the network, rather than on attributes associated with nodes. In this paper, we report on an experiment that (a) compares the effectiveness of several force-directed graph layout algorithms for visually identifying communities, and (b) investigates their usefulness when group membership is based not on structure, but on attributes associated with the people in the network. We find algorithms that clearly separate communities with large distances to be most effective, while using colour to represent community membership is more successful than reliance on structural layout
The Impact of Visual Aesthetics on the Utility, Affordance, and Readability of Network Graphs
The readability of networks – how different visual design elements affect the understanding of network data – has been central in network visualization research. However, existing studies have mainly focused on readability induced by topological mapping (based on different layouts) and overlooked the effect of visual aesthetics. Proposed is a novel experimental framework to study how different network aesthetic choices affect users' abilities of understanding the network structures. The visual aesthetics are grouped in two forms: 1) visual encoding (where the aesthetic mapping depends on the underlying network data) and 2) visual styling (where the aesthetics are applied independent of underlying data). Users are given a simple task – identifying most connected nodes in a network – in a hybrid experimental setting where the visual aesthetic choices are tested in a within-subject manner while the network topologies are tested in a between-subject manner based on a randomized blocking design. This novel experimental design ensures an efficient decoupling of the influence of network topology on readability tests. The utility of different visual aesthetics is measured comprehensively based on task performance (accuracy and time), eye-tracking data, and user feedback (perceived affordance). The results show differential readability effects among choices of visual aesthetics. Particularly, node based visual encoding significantly enhances network readability; specifically, glyphs allow participants to create more robust strategies in their utilization. The study contributes to both the understanding of the role of visual aesthetics in network visualization design and the experimental design for testing the network readability
Explorative Graph Visualization
Netzwerkstrukturen (Graphen) sind heutzutage weit verbreitet. Ihre Untersuchung dient dazu, ein besseres Verständnis ihrer Struktur und der durch sie modellierten realen Aspekte zu gewinnen. Die Exploration solcher Netzwerke wird zumeist mit Visualisierungstechniken unterstützt. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, einen Überblick über die Probleme dieser Visualisierungen zu geben und konkrete Lösungsansätze aufzuzeigen. Dabei werden neue Visualisierungstechniken eingeführt, um den Nutzen der geführten Diskussion für die explorative Graphvisualisierung am konkreten Beispiel zu belegen.Network structures (graphs) have become a natural part of everyday life and their analysis helps to gain an understanding of their inherent structure and the real-world aspects thereby expressed. The exploration of graphs is largely supported and driven by visual means. The aim of this thesis is to give a comprehensive view on the problems associated with these visual means and to detail concrete solution approaches for them. Concrete visualization techniques are introduced to underline the value of this comprehensive discussion for supporting explorative graph visualization