Abstract : Graphs change over time, and typically variations on the small multiples or animation pattern is used to convey this dynamism visually. However, both of these classical techniques have significant drawbacks, so a new approach, Storyline Visualization of Events on a Network (SVEN) is proposed. SVEN builds on storyline techniques, conveying nodes as contiguous lines over time. SVEN encodes time in a natural manner, along the horizontal axis, and optimizes the vertical placement of storylines to decrease clutter (line crossings, straightness, and bends) in the drawing. This paper demonstrates SVEN on several different flavors of real-world dynamic data, and outlines the remaining near-term future work.
Another disadvantage of Rosvall and Bergstrom's technique is that significance clustering is performed on time windows independently, which might introduce noise (nodes oscillating between clusters over time), adding clutter and artifacts to the visualization. Berger-Wolf and Saia introduced an optimization based approach for dynamic community detection that overcomes this pitfall @cite_2 , and this technique was improved in @cite_51 @cite_12 . This framework was utilized to visualize dynamic communities for several datasets. Communities, which span time, are represented as stacked rectangles that span the horizontal space of the visualization. Similar to storyline visualizations, nodes are represented as horizontal lines, placed inside communities, and can only exist in one community at a time. When a node changes communities a diagonal line is used to represent this change. Edges in the network are not shown, and no attempt is made to optimize the ordering of the communities or the nodes within communities. This would likely reduce clutter and improve the aesthetic properties of the visualization.
@cite_51 @cite_12 @cite_2
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We propose frameworks and algorithms for identifying communities in social networks that change over time. Communities are intuitively characterized as "unusually densely knit" subsets of a social network. This notion becomes more problematic if the social interactions change over time. Aggregating social networks over time can radically misrepresent the existing and changing community structure. Instead, we propose an optimization-based approach for modeling dynamic community structure. We prove that finding the most explanatory community structure is NP-hard and APX-hard, and propose algorithms based on dynamic programming, exhaustive search, maximum matching, and greedy heuristics. We demonstrate empirically that the heuristics trace developments of community structure accurately for several synthetic and real-world examples. We propose two approximation algorithms for identifying communities in dynamic social networks. Communities are intuitively characterized as "unusually densely knit" subsets of a social network. This notion becomes more problematic if the social interactions change over time. Aggregating social networks over time can radically misrepresent the existing and changing community structure. Recently, we have proposed an optimization-based framework for modeling dynamic community structure. Also, we have proposed an algorithm for finding such structure based on maximum weight bipartite matching. In this paper, we analyze its performance guarantee for a special case where all actors can be observed at all times. In such instances, we show that the algorithm is a small constant factor approximation of the optimum. We use a similar idea to design an approximation algorithm for the general case where some individuals are possibly unobserved at times, and to show that the approximation factor increases twofold but remains a constant regardless of the input size. This is the first algorithm for inferring communities in dynamic networks with a provable approximation guarantee. We demonstrate the general algorithm on real data sets. The results confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithm in identifying dynamic communities. Finding patterns of social interaction within a population has wide-ranging applications including: disease modeling, cultural and information transmission, and behavioral ecology. Social interactions are often modeled with networks. A key characteristic of social interactions is their continual change. However, most past analyses of social networks are essentially static in that all information about the time that social interactions take place is discarded. In this paper, we propose a new mathematical and computational framework that enables analysis of dynamic social networks and that explicitly makes use of information about when social interactions occur.