Optimizing Staircase Motifs in Biofabric Network Layouts

Biofabric is a novel method for network visualization, with promising potential to highlight specific network features. Recent studies emphasize the importance of staircase motifs — equivalent to fans or stars in node-link diagrams — within Biofabric. However, to effectively showcase these motifs, we need to formulate specialized layout algorithms. This paper introduces a method to compute optimal layouts for Biofabric, focusing on maximizing staircase formation. We present an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model for this task and evaluate its performance in terms of scalability and output quality against a leading heuristic method, Degreecending. Our results demonstrate that the ILP approach identifies significantly more, and often longer, staircases compared to Degreecending, albeit with the trade-off of higher computation times. Our supplemental material, including a full copy of the paper, code, and results, is available on osf.io.