Dynamic Network Visualization

Problem

Networks have a wide application domain with a few examples being biology, chemistry, epidemiology, sociology, and software engineering. Essential tasks include, getting a meaningful overview of the networks underlying structure, identifying and understanding relationships between objects, finding and highlighting central or similar objects, and revealing outliers. Network visualization has proven to be a useful tool that provides support for the aforementioned tasks, yet most solutions do not account for the dynamic nature of the data. Real-world
data is rarely static and for most applications there is often a need for visualizing and analyzing the evolution or change of the network, detecting trends, re-occurrences, peaks, and  identifying outliers and deviations from the normal or expected behavior.

Aim

Visual Analytics techniques to :

• detect and visualize changes in the network
• allow for free exploration of the data in time
• create network layouts based on the temporal characteristic of the data
• utilize the space to encode network metrics
• implementing a LoD (Level of Detail) aggregation for networks

Other information

 

Starting points for research:

• Federico, P., W. Aigner, S. Miksch, F. Windhager, and L. Zenk, "A Visual Analytics Approach to Dynamic Social Networks", Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies (i-KNOW), Special Track on Theory and Applications of Visual Analytics (TAVA), Graz, Austria, ACM, pp. 47:1–47:8, 2011.
• Abello, J., Hadlak, S., Schumann, H., & Schulz, H.-J. (2014). A Modular Degree-of-Interest Specification for the Visual Analysis of Large Dynamic Networks. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 20(3), 337–350. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2013.109

• Bach, B., Pietriga, E., & Fekete, J.-D. (2014). GraphDiaries: Animated Transitions and Temporal Navigation for Dynamic Networks. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 20(5), 740–754. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2013.254

Preferable development environments:

• D3 (https://d3js.org/)
• Angular (https://angular.io)
• TypeScript (https://www.typescriptlang.org/)

 

Contact

• Velitchko Filipov