Eiffel: Evolutionary Flow Map for Influence Graph Visualization

The visualization of evolutionary influence graphs is important for performing many real-life tasks such as citation analysis and social influence analysis. The main challenges include how to summarize large-scale, complex, and time-evolving influence graphs, and how to design effective visual metaphors and dynamic representation methods to illustrate influence patterns over time. In this work, we present Eiffel, an integrated visual analytics system that applies triple summarizations on evolutionary influence graphs in the nodal, relational, and temporal dimensions. In numerical experiments, Eiffel summarization results outperformed those of traditional clustering algorithms with respect to the influence-flow-based objective. Moreover, a flow map representation is proposed and adapted to the case of influence graph summarization, which supports two modes of evolutionary visualization (i.e., flip-book and movie) to expedite the analysis of influence graph dynamics. We conducted two controlled user experiments to evaluate our technique on influence graph summarization and visualization respectively. We also showcased the system in the evolutionary influence analysis of two typical scenarios, the citation influence of scientific papers and the social influence of emerging online events. The evaluation results demonstrate the value of Eiffel in the visual analysis of evolutionary influence graphs.

[1]  Ronald J. Classen,et al.  Introduction to Geographic Information Systems , 2001 .

[2]  Jeffrey S. Torguson,et al.  Cartography: Thematic Map Design , 1990 .

[3]  Mathieu Bastian,et al.  Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks , 2009, ICWSM.

[4]  John D. Lafferty,et al.  Dynamic topic models , 2006, ICML.

[5]  Michael Burch,et al.  The State of the Art in Visualizing Dynamic Graphs , 2014, EuroVis.

[6]  Chris H. Q. Ding,et al.  On the Equivalence of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and Spectral Clustering , 2005, SDM.

[7]  Xiaohua Sun,et al.  Whisper: Tracing the Spatiotemporal Process of Information Diffusion in Real Time , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[8]  Lei Shi,et al.  VEGAS: Visual influEnce GrAph Summarization on Citation Networks , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[9]  J. MacQueen.  Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations , 1967 .

[10]  Ludo Waltman,et al.  CitNetExplorer: A new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks , 2014, J. Informetrics.

[11]  Xiaoru Yuan,et al.  D-Map: Visual analysis of ego-centric information diffusion patterns in social media , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST).

[12]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature , 2006, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[13]  Peter Eades,et al.  FADE: Graph Drawing, Clustering, and Visual Abstraction , 2000, GD.

[14]  P. Rousseeuw.  Silhouettes: a graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis , 1987 .

[15]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Motif Simplification : Improving Network Visualization Readability with Fan and Parallel Glyphs , 2012 .

[16]  Ludo Waltman,et al.  Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping , 2009, Scientometrics.

[17]  Jean-Daniel Fekete,et al.  Hierarchical Aggregation for Information Visualization: Overview, Techniques, and Design Guidelines , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[18]  Gilles Louppe,et al.  Visualization of Publication Impact , 2016, EuroVis.

[19]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Normalized cuts and image segmentation , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[20]  Tovi Grossman,et al.  Citeology: visualizing paper genealogy , 2012, CHI EA '12.

[21]  John T. Stasko,et al.  Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis through Interactive Visualization , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.

[22]  James Abello,et al.  ASK-GraphView: A Large Scale Graph Visualization System , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[23]  Philippe Castagliola,et al.  On the Readability of Graphs Using Node-Link and Matrix-Based Representations: A Controlled Experiment and Statistical Analysis , 2005, Inf. Vis..

[24]  Francisco Herrera,et al.  Science mapping software tools: Review, analysis, and cooperative study among tools , 2011, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[25]  Emden R. Gansner,et al.  An open graph visualization system and its applications to software engineering , 2000, Softw. Pract. Exp..

[26]  P. John Clarkson,et al.  Matrices or Node-Link Diagrams: Which Visual Representation is Better for Visualising Connectivity Models? , 2006, Inf. Vis..

[27]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Searching for intellectual turning points: Progressive knowledge domain visualization , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[28]  Qiaoming Zhu,et al.  Visual analysis of micro-blog retweeting using an information diffusion function , 2016, J. Vis..

[29]  Jure Leskovec,et al.  {SNAP Datasets}: {Stanford} Large Network Dataset Collection , 2014 .

[30]  Cong Quan,et al.  Visualization and pattern discovery of social interactions and repost propagation in Sina Weibo , 2014, 2014 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).

[31]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World , 2010 .

[32]  P. Hanrahan,et al.  Flow map layout , 2005, IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2005. INFOVIS 2005..

[33]  Diansheng Guo,et al.  Flow Mapping and Multivariate Visualization of Large Spatial Interaction Data , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[34]  Donald Laming,et al.  Stevens' Power Law , 1997 .

[35]  Irena V. Marshakova-shaikevich.  System of Document Connections Based on References , 2009 .

[36]  Vijay V. Raghavan,et al.  Co-Citation Count vs Correlation for Influence Network Visualization , 2003, Inf. Vis..

[37]  Henry G. Small,et al.  Co-citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents , 1973, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[38]  Matt J. Kusner,et al.  From Word Embeddings To Document Distances , 2015, ICML.

[39]  Jeffrey Dean,et al.  Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality , 2013, NIPS.

[40]  Mitsuhiko Toda,et al.  Methods for Visual Understanding of Hierarchical System Structures , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[41]  Martin Wattenberg,et al.  Google+Ripples: a native visualization of information flow , 2013, WWW '13.

[42]  Jie Tang,et al.  ArnetMiner: extraction and mining of academic social networks , 2008, KDD.

[43]  Xin Zhang,et al.  WeiboEvents: A Crowd Sourcing Weibo Visual Analytic System , 2014, 2014 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium.

[44]  Quan Li,et al.  Visual analysis of retweeting propagation network in a microblogging platform , 2013, VINCI '13.

[45]  Shou-De Lin,et al.  Modeling and Visualizing Information Propagation in a Micro-blogging Platform , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining.

[46]  Wolfgang G. Stock,et al.  A Software Tool for Informetric Analysis of Citation Linkage , 2006 .

[47]  David Auber,et al.  Tulip - A Huge Graph Visualization Framework , 2004, Graph Drawing Software.

[48]  Peter Bergström,et al.  CircleView : Scalable Visualization and Navigation of Citation Networks , 2006 .

[49]  Qi Han,et al.  CiteRivers: Visual Analytics of Citation Patterns , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[50]  Suzanne Fricke,et al.  Semantic Scholar , 2018, Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA.

[51]  HeerJeffrey,et al.  D3 Data-Driven Documents , 2011 .

[52]  M. De Domenico,et al.  The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor , 2013, Scientific Reports.

[53]  Alan M. MacEachren,et al.  How Maps Work - Representation, Visualization, and Design , 1995 .

[54]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  Apolo: making sense of large network data by combining rich user interaction and machine learning , 2011, CHI.

[55]  John T. Stasko,et al.  Effectiveness of Animation in Trend Visualization , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[56]  Niklas Elmqvist,et al.  CiteWiz: A Tool for the Visualization of Scientific Citation Networks , 2007, Inf. Vis..

[57]  Ludo Waltman,et al.  Visualizing Bibliometric Networks , 2014 .