Are crossings important for drawing large graphs?

Reducing the number of edge crossings is considered one of the most important graph drawing aesthetics. While real-world graphs tend to be large and dense, most of the earlier work on evaluating the impact of edge crossings utilizes relatively small graphs that are manually generated and manipulated. We study the effect on task performance of increased edge crossings in automatically generated layouts for graphs, from different datasets, with different sizes, and with different densities. The results indicate that increasing the number of crossings negatively impacts accuracy and performance time and that impact is significant for small graphs but not significant for large graphs. We also quantitatively evaluate the impact of edge crossings on crossing angles and stress in automatically constructed graph layouts. We find a moderate correlation between minimizing stress and the minimizing the number of crossings. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.National Science Foundation, NSF: CCF-1115971National Science Foundation, NSF: DEB-105357

Ordering metro lines by block crossings

A problem that arises in drawings of transportation networks is to minimize the number of crossings between different transportation lines. While this can be done efficiently under specific constraints, not all solutions are visually equivalent. We suggest merging single crossings into block crossings, that is, crossings of two neighboring groups of consecutive lines. Unfortunately, minimizing the total number of block crossings is NP-hard even for very simple graphs. We give approximation algorithms for special classes of graphs and an asymptotically worst-case optimal algorithm for block crossings on general graphs. Furthermore, we show that the problem remains NP-hard on planar graphs even if both the maximum degree and the number of lines per edge are bounded by constants; on trees, this restricted version becomes tractable. © 2015, Brown University. All rights reserved

Metro-Line Crossing Minimization: Hardness, Approximations, and Tractable Cases

Crossing minimization is one of the central problems in graph drawing. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the problem of minimizing crossings between paths in drawings of graphs. This is the metro-line crossing minimization problem (MLCM): Given an embedded graph and a set L of simple paths, called lines, order the lines on each edge so that the total number of crossings is minimized. So far, the complexity of MLCM has been an open problem. In contrast, the problem variant in which line ends must be placed in outermost position on their edges (MLCM-P) is known to be NP-hard. Our main results answer two open questions: (i) We show that MLCM is NP-hard. (ii) We give an $O(\sqrt{\log |L|})$-approximation algorithm for MLCM-P

Threshold-coloring and unit-cube contact representation of planar graphs

In this paper we study threshold-coloring of graphs, where the vertex colors represented by integers are used to describe any spanning subgraph of the given graph as follows. A pair of vertices with a small difference in their colors implies that the edge between them is present, while a pair of vertices with a big color difference implies that the edge is absent. Not all planar graphs are threshold-colorable, but several subclasses, such as trees, some planar grids, and planar graphs with no short cycles can always be threshold-colored. Using these results we obtain unit-cube contact representation of several subclasses of planar graphs. Variants of the threshold-coloring problem are related to well-known graph coloring and other graph-theoretic problems. Using these relations we show the NP-completeness for two of these variants, and describe a polynomial-time algorithm for another. © 2015 Elsevier B.V

Edge routing with ordered bundles

Edge bundling reduces the visual clutter in a drawing of a graph by uniting the edges into bundles. We propose a method of edge bundling that draws each edge of a bundle separately as in metro-maps and call our method ordered bundles. To produce aesthetically looking edge routes, it minimizes a cost function on the edges. The cost function depends on the ink, required to draw the edges, the edge lengths, widths and separations. The cost also penalizes for too many edges passing through narrow channels by using the constrained Delaunay triangulation. The method avoids unnecessary edge-node and edge-edge crossings. To draw edges with the minimal number of crossings and separately within the same bundle, we develop an efficient algorithm solving a variant of the metro-line crossing minimization problem. In general, the method creates clear and smooth edge routes giving an overview of the global graph structure, while still drawing each edge separately and thus enabling local analysis. © 2015 Elsevier B.V

MapSets: Visualizing embedded and clustered graphs

We describe MapSets, a method for visualizing embedded and clustered graphs. The proposed method relies on a theoretically sound geometric algorithm, which guarantees the contiguity and disjointness of the regions representing the clusters, and also optimizes the convexity of the regions. A fully functional implementation is available online and is used in a comparison with related earlier methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

MapSets: Visualizing embedded and clustered graphs

In addition to objects and relationships between them, groups or clusters of objects are an essential part of many real-world datasets: party affiliation in political networks, types of living organisms in the tree of life, movie genres in the internet movie database. In recent visualization methods, such group information is conveyed by explicit regions that enclose related elements. However, when in addition to fixed cluster membership, the input elements also have fixed positions in space (e.g., geo-referenced data), it becomes difficult to produce readable visualizations. In such fixed-clustering and fixed-embedding settings, some methods produce fragmented regions, while other produce contiguous (connected) regions that may contain overlaps even if the input clusters are disjoint. Both fragmented regions and unnecessary overlaps have a detrimental effect on the interpretation of the drawing. With this in mind, we propose MapSets: a visualization technique that combines the advantages of both methods, producing maps with non-fragmented and non-overlapping regions. The proposed method relies on a theoretically sound geometric algorithm which guarantees contiguity and disjointness of the regions, and also optimizes the convexity of the regions. A fully functional implementation is available in an online system and is used in a comparison with related earlier methods. © 2015, Brown University. All right reserved.National Science Foundation, NSF: 111597

Peacock Bundles: Bundle Coloring for Graphs with Globality-Locality Trade-off

Bundling of graph edges (node-to-node connections) is a common technique to enhance visibility of overall trends in the edge structure of a large graph layout, and a large variety of bundling algorithms have been proposed. However, with strong bundling, it becomes hard to identify origins and destinations of individual edges. We propose a solution: we optimize edge coloring to differentiate bundled edges. We quantify strength of bundling in a flexible pairwise fashion between edges, and among bundled edges, we quantify how dissimilar their colors should be by dissimilarity of their origins and destinations. We solve the resulting nonlinear optimization, which is also interpretable as a novel dimensionality reduction task. In large graphs the necessary compromise is whether to differentiate colors sharply between locally occurring strongly bundled edges ("local bundles"), or also between the weakly bundled edges occurring globally over the graph ("global bundles"); we allow a user-set global-local tradeoff. We call the technique "peacock bundles". Experiments show the coloring clearly enhances comprehensibility of graph layouts with edge bundling.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016

Weak unit disk and interval representation of graphs

We study a variant of intersection representations with unit balls: unit disks in the plane and unit intervals on the line. Given a planar graph and a bipartition of the edges of the graph into near and far edges, the goal is to represent the vertices of the graph by unit-size balls so that the balls for two adjacent vertices intersect if and only if the corresponding edge is near. We consider the problem in the plane and prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether such a representation exists for a given edgepartition. On the other hand, we show that series-parallel graphs (which include outerplanar graphs) admit such a representation with unit disks for any near/far bipartition of the edges. The unit-interval on the line variant is equivalent to threshold graph coloring, in which context it is known that there exist girth-3 planar graphs (even outerplanar graphs) that do not admit such coloring. We extend this result to girth-4 planar graphs. On the other hand, we show that all triangle-free outerplanar graphs and all planar graphs with maximum average degree less than 26/11 have such a coloring, via unit-interval intersection representation on the line. This gives a simple proof that all planar graphs with girth at least 13 have a unit-interval intersection representation on the line. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Happy edges: Threshold-coloring of regular lattices

We study a graph coloring problem motivated by a fun Sudoku-style puzzle. Given a bipartition of the edges of a graph into near and far sets and an integer threshold t, a threshold-coloring of the graph is an assignment of integers to the vertices so that endpoints of near edges differ by t or less, while endpoints of far edges differ by more than t. We study threshold-coloring of tilings of the plane by regular polygons, known as Archimedean lattices, and their duals, the Laves lattices. We prove that some are threshold-colorable with constant number of colors for any edge labeling, some require an unbounded number of colors for specific labelings, and some are not threshold-colorable. © 2014 Springer International Publishing