Bundling-Aware Graph Drawing

Abstract

Edge bundling algorithms significantly improve the visualization of dense graphs by reducing the clutter of many edges visible on screen by bundling them together. As such, bundling is often viewed as a post-processing step applied to a drawing, and the vast majority of edge bundling algorithms consider a graph and its drawing as input. Another way of thinking about edge bundling is to simultaneously optimize both the drawing and the bundling. In this paper, we investigate methods to simultaneously optimize a graph drawing and its bundling. We describe an algorithmic framework which consists of three main steps, namely Filter, Draw, and Bundle. We then propose two alternative implementations and experimentally compare them against the state-of-the-art approach and the simple idea of drawing and subsequently bundling the graph. The experiments confirm that bundled drawings created by our framework outperform previous approaches according to standard quality metrics for edge bundling.