Treenetviz: Revealing patterns of networks over tree structures

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

43 Scopus citations

Abstract

Network data often contain important attributes from various dimensions such as social affiliations and areas of expertise in a social network. If such attributes exhibit a tree structure, visualizing a compound graph consisting of tree and network structures becomes complicated. How to visually reveal patterns of a network over a tree has not been fully studied. In this paper, we propose a compound graph model, TreeNet, to support visualization and analysis of a network at multiple levels of aggregation over a tree. We also present a visualization design, TreeNetViz, to offer the multiscale and cross-scale exploration and interaction of a TreeNet graph. TreeNetViz uses a Radial, Space-Filling (RSF) visualization to represent the tree structure, a circle layout with novel optimization to show aggregated networks derived from TreeNet, and an edge bundling technique to reduce visual complexity. Our circular layout algorithm reduces both total edge-crossings and edge length and also considers hierarchical structure constraints and edge weight in a TreeNet graph. These experiments illustrate that the algorithm can reduce visual cluttering in TreeNet graphs. Our case study also shows that TreeNetViz has the potential to support the analysis of a compound graph by revealing multiscale and cross-scale network patterns.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number6065012
Pages (from-to)2449-2458
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume17
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Treenetviz: Revealing patterns of networks over tree structures'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this