Drawing Dynamic Graphs Without Timeslices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel model and algorithm for drawing dynamic graphs without relying on timeslices, effectively capturing continuous temporal data and improving visualization accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a timeslice-free model for dynamic graphs and presents DynNoSlice, a new algorithm that outperforms traditional timeslicing methods in visualizing continuous data.

Findings

DynNoSlice better preserves temporal features.

The approach improves visualization quality on continuous data.

It reduces computation time compared to timeslicing methods.

Abstract

Timeslices are often used to draw and visualize dynamic graphs. While timeslices are a natural way to think about dynamic graphs, they are routinely imposed on continuous data. Often, it is unclear how many timeslices to select: too few timeslices can miss temporal features such as causality or even graph structure while too many timeslices slows the drawing computation. We present a model for dynamic graphs which is not based on timeslices, and a dynamic graph drawing algorithm, DynNoSlice, to draw graphs in this model. In our evaluation, we demonstrate the advantages of this approach over timeslicing on continuous data sets.