ViNCent – Visualization of NetworkCentralities

Abstract:

In the area of information visualization social or biological networks are visualized ina way so that they can be explored easily and one can get more information about thestructure of the network out of it.

The use of network centralities in the field of network analysis plays an importantrole when it comes to the rating of the relative importance of vertices within the networkstructure based on the neighborhood of them. Such a single network can be renderedeasily by the use of standard graph drawing algorithms. But it is not only the explorationof one centrality which is important. Furthermore, the comparison of two or more of themis important to get some further meaning out of it. When visualizing the comparisonof two or more network centralities we are facing new problems of how to visualizethem in a way to get out the most meaning of it. We want to be able to track all thechanges in the networks between two centralities as well as visualize the single networksas best as possible. In the life sciences centrality measures help scientists to understand theunderlying biological processes and have been successfully applied to different biologicalnetworks.

The aim of the thesis is it to overcome those problems and to come up with a new solutionof how to visualize networks and its centralities. This thesis introduces a new way ofrendering networks including their centrality values along a circular view. Researches canthen be focused on the exploration of the centrality values including the network structure,without dealing with visual clutter or occlusions of nodes. Furthermore, filtering based instatistical data concerning the datasets and centrality values support this.