Event‐based Dynamic Graph Drawing without the Agonizing Pain

Abstract

Temporal networks can naturally model real-world complex phenomena such as contact networks, information dissemination and physical proximity. However, nodes and edges bear real-time coordinates, making it difficult to organize them into discrete timeslices, without a loss of temporal information due to projection. Event-based dynamic graph drawing rejects the notion of a timeslice and allows each node and edge to retain its own real-valued time coordinate. While existing work has demonstrated clear advantages for this approach, they come at a running time cost. We investigate the problem of accelerating event-based layout to make it more competitive with existing layout techniques. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of MultiDynNoS, the first multi-level event-based graph layout algorithm. We consider three operators for coarsening and placement, inspired by Walshaw, GRIP and FM3, which we couple with an event-based graph drawing algorithm. We also propose two extensions to the core algorithm: AutoTau and Bend Transfer. We perform two experiments: first, we compare MultiDynNoS variants to existing state-of-the-art dynamic graph layout approaches; second, we investigate the impact of each of the proposed algorithm extensions. MultiDynNoS proves to be competitive with existing approaches, and the proposed extensions achieve their design goals and contribute in opening new research directions.