We introduce multiforce, a force-directed layout for multiplex networks, where the nodes of the network are organized into multiple layers and both in-layer and inter-layer relationships among nodes are used to compute node coordinates. The proposed approach generalizes existing work, providing a range of intermediate layouts in-between the ones produced by known methods. Our experiments on real data show that multiforce can keep nodes well aligned across different layers without significantly affecting their internal layouts when the layers have similar or compatible topologies. As a consequence, multiforce enriches the benefits of force-directed layouts by also supporting the identification of topological correspondences between layers.
An extreme case of indirect methods, that we mention for completeness, consists in not visualizing nodes and edges at all but only indirect network properties, such as the degree of the nodes in the different layers or other summary measures @cite_3 @cite_28 @cite_2 . These approaches are complementary to graph drawing, and can also be used in combination with our proposal. Our method belongs to the slicing class, and is different from existing approaches because it allows a balancing of the effects of in-layer and inter-layer relationships.
@cite_28 @cite_3 @cite_2
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In this article we discuss visualisation strategies for multiplex networks. Since Moreno's early works on network analysis, visualisation has been one of the main ways to understand networks thanks ... Multilayer relationships among entities and information about entities must be accompanied by the means to analyse, visualize and obtain insights from such data. We present open-source software (muxViz) that contains a collection of algorithms for the analysis of multilayer networks, which are an important way to represent a large variety of complex systems throughout science and engineering. We demonstrate the ability of muxViz to analyse and interactively visualize multilayer data using empirical genetic, neuronal and transportation networks. Our software is available at https: github.com manlius muxViz. Recent advances in network science allows the modeling and analysis of complex inter-related entities. These entities often interact with each other in a number of different ways. Simple graphs fail to capture these multiple types of relationships requiring more sophisticated mathematical structures. One such structure is multigraph, where entities (or nodes) can be linked to each other through multiple edges. In this paper we describe a new method to manage multiple types of relationships existing in multigraphs. Our approach is based on the concept of pair of nodes (edges) and, in particular, we study how nodes on different layers interact which each other considering the edges they share. We propose a two level strategy that summarizes global local multigraph features. The global view helps us to gain knowledge related to the characteristics of layers and how they interact while the local view provides an analysis of individual layers highlighting edge properties such as cluster structure. Our proposal is complementary to standard node-link diagram and it can be coupled with such techniques in order to intelligently explore multigraphs. The proposed visualization is tested on a real world case study and the outcomes point out the ability of our proposal to discover patterns present in the data.