AdaMotif: Graph Simplification via Adaptive Motif Design

TL;DR

AdaMotif is a graph visualization method that simplifies large graphs by partitioning, clustering, and creating adaptive motifs to preserve key structural and community information for clearer visualization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive motif design approach that effectively simplifies large graphs while maintaining essential structural and community details.

Findings

Successfully visualizes large graphs with preserved community structures

Demonstrates effectiveness through case studies and user evaluations

Achieves significant graph simplification without losing critical information

Abstract

With the increase of graph size, it becomes difficult or even impossible to visualize graph structures clearly within the limited screen space. Consequently, it is crucial to design effective visual representations for large graphs. In this paper, we propose AdaMotif, a novel approach that can capture the essential structure patterns of large graphs and effectively reveal the overall structures via adaptive motif designs. Specifically, our approach involves partitioning a given large graph into multiple subgraphs, then clustering similar subgraphs and extracting similar structural information within each cluster. Subsequently, adaptive motifs representing each cluster are generated and utilized to replace the corresponding subgraphs, leading to a simplified visualization. Our approach aims to preserve as much information as possible from the subgraphs while simplifying the graph efficiently. Notably, our approach successfully visualizes crucial community information within a large graph. We conduct case studies and a user study using real-world graphs to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate the capability of our approach in simplifying graphs while retaining important structural and community information.