ProtEGOnist: Visual Analysis of Interactions in Small World Networks Using Ego‐graphs

Abstract

Visualizing small‐world networks such as protein‐protein interaction networks or social networks often leads to visual clutter and limited interpretability. To overcome these problems, we present ProtEGOnist, a visualization approach designed to explore small‐world networks. ProtEGOnist visualizes networks using ego‐graphs that represent local neighborhoods. Ego‐graphs are visualized in an aggregated state as a glyph where the size encodes the size of the neighborhood and in a detailed version where the original network nodes can be explored. The ego‐graphs are arranged in an ego‐graph network, where edges encode similarity using the Jaccard index. Our design aims to reduce visual complexity and clutter while enabling detailed exploration and facilitating the discovery of meaningful patterns. To achieve this, our approach offers a network overview using ego‐graphs, a radar chart for a one‐to‐many ego‐graph comparison and meta‐data integration, and detailed ego‐graph subnetworks for interactive exploration. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on a co‐author network and two different protein‐protein interaction networks. A web‐based prototype of ProtEGOnist can be accessed online at https://protegonist-tuevis.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/.