Relative Direction Change - A Topology-based Metric for Layout Stability in Treemaps

This paper presents a topology-based metric for layout stability in treemaps—the Relative Direction Change (RDC). The presented metric considers the adjacency and arrangement of single shapes in a treemap, and allows for a rotation-invariant description of layout changes between two snapshots of a dataset depicted with treemaps. A user study was conducted that shows the applicability of the Relative Direction Change in comparison and addition to established layout metrics, such as Average Distance Change (ADC) and Average Aspect Ratio (AAR), with respect to human perception of treemaps. This work contributes to the establishment of a more precise model for the replicable and reliable comparison of treemap layout algorithms.

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