Multivariate Network Visualization Techniques

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

Implicit - Leaves Only
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Leaf-centric layouts are those that only or predominantly allocate screen space for the leaves of a multivariate tree and encode the hierarchy by inclusion/nesting. The classical example of this type of layout is the Treemap, originally proposed by Johnson and Shneiderman.

Optimized for tree structures and tasks on single nodes and subnetworks.

Suports medium and large networks with over 1000 nodes, as well as tasks on neighbors.

Not ideal for several, heterogenous node attributes or tasks on paths.

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

Examples Figures from the Literature

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Slingsby et al. 2009
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Balzer et al. 2005

Technique Scores

Reccommended Usage

Leaf-centric implicit layouts are well suited for analyzing trees with an important numerical attribute on the leaves. Because this layout assigns most, if not all, display space to the leaves of a tree, and the hierarchical structure groups small elements, it is more scalable than implicit layouts that also visualize inner nodes (see Table 2). Treemaps have been used to visualize up to a million items. Path-related tasks can be difficult because the tree structure is often only implied.

Example Papers

    Bruls M., Huizing K., Wijk J., Squarified Treemaps. Data Visualization 2000 (2000), pp. 33-42, .

    Fekete J., Plaisant C., Interactive information visualization of a million items. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis '02) (2002), pp. 117-124, doi:10.1109/INFVIS.2002.1173156.

    Balzer M., Deussen O., Voronoi treemaps. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2005. INFOVIS 2005. (2005), pp. 49-56, doi:10.1109/INFVIS.2005.1532128.

    Slingsby A., Dykes J., Wood J., Configuring Hierarchical Layouts to Address Research Questions. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2009), vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 977-984, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2009.128.

    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.