Overlap-Free Drawing of Generalized Pythagoras Trees for Hierarchy Visualization

Abstract

Generalized Pythagoras trees were developed for visualizing hierarchical data, producing organic, fractal-like representations. However, the drawback of the original layout algorithm is visual overlap of tree branches. To avoid such overlap, we introduce an adapted drawing algorithm using ellipses instead of circles to recursively place tree nodes representing the subhierarchies. Our technique is demonstrated by resolving overlap in diverse real-world and generated datasets, while comparing the results to the original approach.