A process-centric data mining and visual analytic tool for exploring complex social networks

Abstract

Social scientists and observational scientists have a need to analyze complex network data sets. Examples of such exploratory tasks include: finding communities that exist in the data, comparing results from different graph mining algorithms, identifying regions of similarity or dissimilarity in the data sets, and highlighting nodes with important centrality properties. While many methods, algorithms, and visualizations exist, the capability to apply and combine them for ad-hoc visual exploration or as part of an analytic workflow process is still an open problem that needs to be addressed to help scientists, especially those without extensive programming knowledge. In this paper, we present Invenio-Workflow, a tool that supports exploratory analysis of network data by integrating workflow, querying, data mining, statistics, and visualization to enable scientific inquiry. Invenio-Workflow can be used to create custom exploration tasks, in addition to the standard task templates. After describing the features of the system, we illustrate its utility through several use cases based on networks from different domains.