Evaluation of Graph Layout Methods Based on Visual Perception

Node-link diagrams provide an intuitive way to explore networks and have inspired a large number of automated graph layout strategies that optimize aesthetic criteria. However, any particular drawing approach cannot fully satisfy all these criteria simultaneously. So the evaluation methods are designed to explore the advantages and disadvantages of different graph layout methods from these standards. Starting from the point of visual perception, this paper analyzes the node's visual importance based on a user experiment and designs a model to measure the node's visual importance. Then evaluate the pros and cons of graph layout methods by comparing the topological importance and visual importance of nodes. A heatmap-based visualization is used to provide visual feedback for the difference between the topological importance and visual importance of nodes. Meantime, a metric is built to quantify the difference precisely. Finally, experiments are done under different scale of data sets to further analyze the characteristics of these graph layout methods.