11 research outputs found
Drawing Big Graphs using Spectral Sparsification
Spectral sparsification is a general technique developed by Spielman et al.
to reduce the number of edges in a graph while retaining its structural
properties. We investigate the use of spectral sparsification to produce good
visual representations of big graphs. We evaluate spectral sparsification
approaches on real-world and synthetic graphs. We show that spectral
sparsifiers are more effective than random edge sampling. Our results lead to
guidelines for using spectral sparsification in big graph visualization.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Improved Optimal and Approximate Power Graph Compression for Clearer Visualisation of Dense Graphs
Drawings of highly connected (dense) graphs can be very difficult to read.
Power Graph Analysis offers an alternate way to draw a graph in which sets of
nodes with common neighbours are shown grouped into modules. An edge connected
to the module then implies a connection to each member of the module. Thus, the
entire graph may be represented with much less clutter and without loss of
detail. A recent experimental study has shown that such lossless compression of
dense graphs makes it easier to follow paths. However, computing optimal power
graphs is difficult. In this paper, we show that computing the optimal
power-graph with only one module is NP-hard and therefore likely NP-hard in the
general case. We give an ILP model for power graph computation and discuss why
ILP and CP techniques are poorly suited to the problem. Instead, we are able to
find optimal solutions much more quickly using a custom search method. We also
show how to restrict this type of search to allow only limited back-tracking to
provide a heuristic that has better speed and better results than previously
known heuristics.Comment: Extended technical report accompanying the PacificVis 2013 paper of
the same nam
Balancing between the Local and Global Structures (LGS) in Graph Embedding
We present a method for balancing between the Local and Global Structures
(LGS) in graph embedding, via a tunable parameter. Some embedding methods aim
to capture global structures, while others attempt to preserve local
neighborhoods. Few methods attempt to do both, and it is not always possible to
capture well both local and global information in two dimensions, which is
where most graph drawing live. The choice of using a local or a global
embedding for visualization depends not only on the task but also on the
structure of the underlying data, which may not be known in advance. For a
given graph, LGS aims to find a good balance between the local and global
structure to preserve. We evaluate the performance of LGS with synthetic and
real-world datasets and our results indicate that it is competitive with the
state-of-the-art methods, using established quality metrics such as stress and
neighborhood preservation. We introduce a novel quality metric, cluster
distance preservation, to assess intermediate structure capture. All
source-code, datasets, experiments and analysis are available online.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2023
Scalability considerations for multivariate graph visualization
Real-world, multivariate datasets are frequently too large to show in their entirety on a visual display. Still, there are many techniques we can employ to show useful partial views-sufficient to support incremental exploration of large graph datasets. In this chapter, we first explore the cognitive and architectural limitations which restrict the amount of visual bandwidth available to multivariate graph visualization approaches. These limitations afford several design approaches, which we systematically explore. Finally, we survey systems and studies that exhibit these design strategies to mitigate these perceptual and architectural limitations
An Information-Theoretic Framework for Evaluating Edge Bundling Visualization
Edge bundling is a promising graph visualization approach to simplifying the visual result of a graph drawing. Plenty of edge bundling methods have been developed to generate diverse graph layouts. However, it is difficult to defend an edge bundling method with its resulting layout against other edge bundling methods as a clear theoretic evaluation framework is absent in the literature. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic framework to evaluate the visual results of edge bundling techniques. We first illustrate the advantage of edge bundling visualizations for large graphs, and pinpoint the ambiguity resulting from drawing results. Second, we define and quantify the amount of information delivered by edge bundling visualization from the underlying network using information theory. Third, we propose a new algorithm to evaluate the resulting layouts of edge bundling using the amount of the mutual information between a raw network dataset and its edge bundling visualization. Comparison examples based on the proposed framework between different edge bundling techniques are presented
Scalability considerations for multivariate graph visualization
Real-world, multivariate datasets are frequently too large to show in their entirety on a visual display. Still, there are many techniques we can employ to show useful partial views-sufficient to support incremental exploration of large graph datasets. In this chapter, we first explore the cognitive and architectural limitations which restrict the amount of visual bandwidth available to multivariate graph visualization approaches. These limitations afford several design approaches, which we systematically explore. Finally, we survey systems and studies that exhibit these design strategies to mitigate these perceptual and architectural limitations
DEPLOYING, IMPROVING AND EVALUATING EDGE BUNDLING METHODS FOR VISUALIZING LARGE GRAPHS
A tremendous increase in the scale of graphs has been witnessed in a wide range of fields, which demands efficient and effective visualization techniques to assist users in better understandings of large graphs. Conventional node-link diagrams are often used to visualize graphs, whereas excessive edge crossings can easily incur severe visual clutter in the node-link diagram of a large graph. Edge bundling can effectively remedy visual clutter and reveal high-level graph structures. Although significant efforts have been devoted to developing edge bundling, three challenging problems remain. First, edge bundling techniques are often computationally expensive and are not easy to deploy for web-based applications. The state-of-the-art edge bundling methods often require special system supports and techniques such as high-end GPU acceleration for large graphs, which makes these methods less portable, especially for ubiquitous mobile devices. Second, the quantitative quality of edge bundling results is barely assessed in the literature. Currently, the comparison of edge bundling mainly focuses on computational performance and perceptual results. Third, although the family of edge bundling techniques has a rich set of bundling layout, there is a lack of a generic method to generate different styles of edge bundling.
In this research, I aim to address these problems and have made the following contributions. First, I provide an efficient framework to deploy edge bundling for web-based platforms by exploiting standard graphics hardware functions and libraries. My framework can generate high-quality edge bundling results on web-based platforms, and achieve a speedup of 50X compared to the previous state-of-the-art edge bundling method on a graph with half of a million edges. Second, I propose a new moving least squares based approach to lower the algorithm complexity of edge bundling. In addition, my approach can generate better bundling results compared to other methods based on a quality metric. Third, I provide an information-theoretic metric to evaluate the edge bundling methods. I leverage information theory in this metric. With my information-theoretic metric, domain users can choose appropriate edge bundling methods with proper parameters for their applications. Last but not least, I present a deep learning framework for edge bundling visualizations. Through a training process that learns the results of a specific edge bundling method, my deep learning framework can infer the final layout of the edge bundling method. My deep learning framework is a generic framework that can generate the corresponding results of different edge bundling methods.
Adviser: Hongfeng Y
Visualising Geographically-Embedded Origin-Destination Flows: in 2D and immersive environments
This thesis develops and evaluates effective techniques for visualisation of
flows (e.g. of people, trade, knowledge) between places on geographic maps.
This geographically-embedded flow data contains information about geographic
locations, and flows from origin locations to destination locations. We
explored the design space of OD flow visualisation in both 2D and immersive
environments. We do so by creating novel OD flow visualisations in both
environments, and then conducting controlled user studies to evaluate different
designs.Comment: PhD Thesis, Monash University, Australia, December 2018. Update:
corrected typos in arXiv comment