Fast Graph Drawing Algorithm Revealing Networks Cores

International audienceGraph is a powerful tool to model relationships between elements and has been widely used in different research areas. Size and complexity of newly acquired graphs prohibit manual representations and urge a need for automatic visualization methods. We are interested with the node-links diagram which represents each node as a glyph and edge as a line between the corresponding nodes. We present a novel layout algorithm that emphasizes the cores of very large networks (up to several hundred thousand of nodes and million of edges) in few seconds or minutes. Our method uses a hierarchical coreness decomposition of the graph and a combination of existing layout algorithms according to the clusters topologies. Area-aware drawing algorithms which produce node overlap-free drawings are used to reduce the visual clutter. Edges are bundled along the hierarchy of clusters to highlight the network communities and reduce edge visual clutter. We validated our approach by comparing our method against one of the fastest method of the state of the art on a benchmark of 23 large graphs extracted from various sources. We have statistically proved that our method performs faster while providing meaningful results