Multivariate Network Visualization Techniques

A companion website for the STAR Report on Multivariate Network Visualization Techniques.

Implicit - Inner Nodes + Leaves
Placeholder image

Implicit layouts such as Sunburst and Icicle Plots show both the whole backbone of the tree with the intermediate nodes and the leafs. The hierarchy is encoded by adjacency, i.e a child node is adjacent to its root. The root-child relationship is encoded by the order (inner-to-outer for Sunburst, for example).

Optimized for trees and tasks on single nodes, neighbors, paths, and subnetworks.

Suports medium networks, up to 1000 nodes.

Not ideal for several, heterogenous node attributes, as well as large networks with over 1000 nodes.

Does not support edge attributes or non-tree like networks, as well as tasks on clusters.

Examples Figures from the Literature

Placeholder image
Placeholder image
Beck et al. 2014

Technique Scores

Reccommended Usage

Implicit tree layouts for inner nodes and leaves are well suited for tree datasets with numerical attributes at the leaves and potentially a secondary attribute at inner nodes and/or leaves. In contrast to leaves-only layouts, these layouts support finding neighbors and paths between nodes well (see Table 2). The layouts scale well with regard to the number of nodes; however, deep hierarchies tend to use plenty of of space. Various intuitive interactions are available, such as successively revealing leaves on demand, to deal with deeper trees. Overall, we recommend implicit tree layouts for inner nodes and leaves for tree datasets where one numerical leaf attribute is dominant, and the tree topology plays an important role.

Example Papers

    Kruskal J., Landwehr J., Icicle Plots: Better Displays for Hierarchical Clustering. The American Statistician (1983), vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 162, doi:10.2307/2685881.

    Andrews K., Heidegger H., Information slices: visualising and exploring large hierarchies using cascading, semicircular discs.. InfoVis'98: Proc. IEEE Information Visualization Symposium, Carolina, USA (1998), pp. 9-12, .

    Stasko J., Zhang E., Focus+Context Display and Navigation Techniques for Enhancing Radial, Space-Filling Hierarchy Visualizations. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Vizualization (InfoVis '00) (2000), pp. 57-65, doi:10.1109/INFVIS.2000.885091.

    Schulz H., Hadlak S., Schumann H., The Design Space of Implicit Hierarchy Visualization: A Survey. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2011), vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 393-411, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2010.79.

    Beck F., Wiszniewsky F., Burch M., Diehl S., Weiskopf D., Asymmetric Visual Hierarchy Comparison with Nested Icicle Plots. Proceedings of the Workshop on Graph Visualization in Practice (GraphVIP '14) (2014), .