GUIRO: User-Guided Matrix Reordering

Dynamic graph exploration by interactively linked node-link diagrams and matrix visualizations

The visualization of dynamic graphs is a challenging task owing to the various properties of the underlying relational data and the additional time-varying property. For sparse and small graphs, the most efficient approach to such visualization is node-link diagrams, whereas for dense graphs with attached data, adjacency matrices might be the better choice. Because graphs can contain both properties, being globally sparse and locally dense, a combination of several visual metaphors as well as static and dynamic visualizations is beneficial. In this paper, a visually and algorithmically scalable approach that provides views and perspectives on graphs as interactively linked node-link and adjacency matrix visualizations is described. As the novelty of this technique, insights such as clusters or anomalies from one or several combined views can be used to influence the layout or reordering of the other views. Moreover, the importance of nodes and node groups can be detected, computed, and visualized by considering several layout and reordering properties in combination as well as different edge properties for the same set of nodes. As an additional feature set, an automatic identification of groups, clusters, and outliers is provided over time, and based on the visual outcome of the node-link and matrix visualizations, the repertoire of the supported layout and matrix reordering techniques is extended, and more interaction techniques are provided when considering the dynamics of the graph data. Finally, a small user experiment was conducted to investigate the usability of the proposed approach. The usefulness of the proposed tool is illustrated by applying it to a graph dataset, such as e co-authorships, co-citations, and a Comprehensible Perl Archive Network distribution.

Auditing the Sensitivity of Graph-based Ranking with Visual Analytics

Graph mining plays a pivotal role across a number of disciplines, and a variety of algorithms have been developed to answer who/what type questions. For example, what items shall we recommend to a given user on an e-commerce platform? The answers to such questions are typically returned in the form of a ranked list, and graph-based ranking methods are widely used in industrial information retrieval settings. However, these ranking algorithms have a variety of sensitivities, and even small changes in rank can lead to vast reductions in product sales and page hits. As such, there is a need for tools and methods that can help model developers and analysts explore the sensitivities of graph ranking algorithms with respect to perturbations within the graph structure. In this paper, we present a visual analytics framework for explaining and exploring the sensitivity of any graph-based ranking algorithm by performing perturbation-based what-if analysis. We demonstrate our framework through three case studies inspecting the sensitivity of two classic graph-based ranking algorithms (PageRank and HITS) as applied to rankings in political news media and social networks.