SolarView: Low Distortion Radial Embedding with a Focus

Abstract

We propose a novel type of low distortion radial embedding which focuses on one specific entity and its closest neighbors. Our embedding preserves near-exact distances to the focus entity and aims to minimize distortion between the other entities. We present an interactive exploration tool SolarView which places the focus entity at the center of a "solar system" and embeds its neighbors guided by concentric circles. SolarView provides an implementation of our novel embedding and several state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction and embedding techniques, which we adapted to our setting in various ways. We experimentally evaluated our embedding and compared it to these state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that our embedding competes with these techniques and achieves low distortion in practice. Our method performs particularly well when the visualization, and hence the embedding, adheres to the solar system design principle of our application. Nonetheless - as with all dimensionality reduction techniques - the distortion may be high. We leverage interaction techniques to give clear visual cues that allow users to accurately judge distortion. We illustrate the use of SolarView by exploring the high-dimensional metric space of bibliographic entity similarities.

Target Netgrams: An Annulus-Constrained Stress Model for Radial Graph Visualization

“…In the 1990s, the term radial visualization was introduced by Hoffman et al [22] for a distinct visualization method. Due to aesthetics and space efficiency, it is commonly used for visualizing four kinds of data: hierarchical structures [23], relationships between entities [24], ranking of search results [25], serial periodic data [26] as well as multi-dimensional data [27]. Our special interest lies in their inherent intuitiveness for visualizing the relationship in graphs.…”