Fast Graph Drawing Algorithm Revealing Networks Cores

摘要

Graph 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.