On the readability of graphs using node-link and matrix-based representations: a controlled experiment and statistical analysis

  • Authors:

  • Mohammad Ghoniem;Jean-Daniel Fekete;Philippe Castagliola

  • Affiliations:

  • Ecole des Mines de Nantes, Nantes, Cedex, France;INRIA Futurs/LRI, Université Paris-Sud, Cedex, France;IRCCyN/IUT de Nantes, Rue Christian Pauc - La Chantrerie, Nantes, Cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • Information Visualization
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this article, we describe a taxonomy of generic graph related tasks along with a computer-based evaluation designed to assess the readability of two representations of graphs: matrix-based representations and node-link diagrams. This evaluation encompasses seven generic tasks and leads to insightful recommendations for the representation of graphs according to their size and density. Typically, we show that when graphs are bigger than twenty vertices, the matrix-based visualization outperforms node-link diagrams on most tasks. Only path finding is consistently in favor of node-link diagrams throughout the evaluation.