An Exploratory Visual Analytics Tool for Multivariate Dynamic Networks

Abstract

Visualizing multivariate dynamic networks is a challenging task. The evolution of the dynamic network within the temporal axis must be depicted in conjunction with the associated multivariate attributes. In this paper, an exploratory visual analytics tool is proposed to display multivariate dynamic networks with spatial attributes. The proposed tool displays the distribution of multivariate temporal domain and network attributes in scattered views. Moreover, in order to expose the evolution of a single or a group of nodes in the dynamic network along the temporal axis, an egocentric approach is applied in which a node is represented with its neighborhood as an ego-network. This approach allows users to observe a node's surrounding environment along the temporal axis. On top of the traditional ego-network visualization methods, such as timelines, the proposed tool encodes ego-networks as feature vectors consisting of the domain and network attributes and projects them onto 2D views. As a result, the distance between projected ego-networks represents the dissimilarity across the temporal axis in a single view. The proposed tool is demonstrated with a real-world use case scenario on merchant networks obtained from a one-year-long credit card transactions.