Visualizing Evolving Networks: Minimum Spanning Trees versus Pathfinder Networks

Network evolution is a ubiquitous phenomenon in a wide variety of complex systems. There is an increasing interest in statistically modeling the evolution of complex networks such as small-world networks and scale-free networks. In this article, we address a practical issue concerning the visualization of network evolution. We compare the visualizations of co-citation networks of scientific publications derived by two widely known link reduction algorithms, namely minimum spanning trees (MSTs) and Pathfinder networks (PFNETs). Our primarily goal is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the two methods in fulfilling the need for visualizing evolving networks. Two criteria are derived for assessing visualizations of evolving networks in terms of topological properties and dynamical properties. We examine the animated visualization models of the evolution of botulinum toxin research in terms of its co-citation structure across a 58-year span (1945-2002). The results suggest that al...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: INFOVIS
• Authors: Chaomei Chen, Steven Morris
• Keywords: INFOVIS 2003, Network Evolution, Scale-free Networks, Small-world Networks