An energy-based model to optimize cluster visualization

Abstract

Graphs are mathematical structures that provide natural means for complex-data representation. Graphs capture the structure and thus help modeling a wide range of complex real-life data in various domains. Moreover graphs are especially suitable for information visualization. Indeed the intuitive visual-abstraction (dots and lines) they provide is intimately associated with graphs. Visualization paves the way to interactive exploratory data-analysis and to important goals such as identifying groups and subgroups among data and helping to understand how these groups interact with each other. In this paper, we present a graph drawing approach that helps to better appreciate the cluster structure in data and the interactions that may exist between clusters. In this work, we assume that the clusters are already extracted and focus rather on the visualization aspects. We propose an energy-based model for graph drawing that produces an esthetic drawing that ensures each cluster will occupy a separate zone within the visualization layout. This method emphasizes the inter-groups interactions and still shows the inter-nodes interactions. The drawing areas assigned to the clusters can be user-specified (prefixed areas) or automatically crafted (free areas). The approach we suggest also enables handling geographically-based clustering. In the case of free areas, we illustrate the use of our drawing method through an example. In the case of prefixed areas, we first use an example from citation networks and then use another example to compare the results of our method to those of the divide and conquer approach. In the latter case, we show that while the two methods successfully point out the cluster structure our method better visualize the global structure.