skip to main content
10.1145/3067695.3082552acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesgeccoConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

On the role of aesthetics in genetic algorithms applied to graph drawing

Published: 15 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Despite the role that aesthetics plays in information visualization, it is often downplayed or ignored in favor of functionality. However, by understanding how graphical representations are perceived it is also possible to improve them and create more comprehensible data visualizations. Meaningful relationships and data patterns can easily get lost among the representation of large and complex datasets. Various methods have been created to reduce visual clutter by either sorting nodes to minimize the number of intersecting edges, or by grouping edges into bundles with clear directions. In information visualization, perception principles have started being integrated into evolutionary computation in order to solve aesthetic problems, as they are capable of looking for solutions that may be found beyond local optima. In this paper we present a study on the importance of aesthetics and how evolutionary approaches can be used to influence visualization. This is supplemented with two case studies involving the design of genetic algorithms for reducing visual clutter through edge crossing minimization and edge bundling parameter optimization.

References

[1]
Michael H. Albert, Mike D. Atkinson, Doron Nussbaum, Jörg-Rüdiger Sack, and Nicola Santoro. 2007. On the longest increasing subsequence of a circular list. Inform. Process. Lett. 101, 2 (2007), 55--59.
[2]
Michael Baur and Ulrik Brandes. 2005. Crossing Reduction in Circular Layouts. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 332--343.
[3]
Michelle A. Borkin, Azalea A. Vo, Zoya Bylinskii, Phillip Isola, Shashank Sunkavalli, Aude Oliva, and Hanspeter Pfister. 2013. What Makes a Visualization Memorable? IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 19, 12 (2013), 2306--2315.
[4]
Jürgen Branke, Frank Bucher, and Hartmut Schmeck. 1996. Using genetic algorithms for drawing undirected graphs. In The Third Nordic Workshop on Genetic Algorithms and their Applications. Citeseer, 193--206.
[5]
Nick Cawthon and Andrew Vande Moere. 2007. The Effect of Aesthetic on the Usability of Data Visualization. In 11th International Conference on Information Visualisation, IV 2007, 2--6 July 2007, Zürich, Switzerland. 637--648.
[6]
Geoffrey M Draper, Yarden Livnat, and Richard F Riesenfeld. 2009. A survey of radial methods for information visualization. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 15, 5 (2009), 759--776.
[7]
Emden R. Gansner and Yehuda Koren. 2006. Improved Circular Layouts. In Graph Drawing, 14th International Symposium, GD 2006, Karlsruhe, Germany, September 18--20, 2006. Revised Papers. 386--398.
[8]
Farshad Ghassemi Toosi, Nikola S Nikolov, and Malachy Eaton. 2016. A GA-Inspired Approach to the Reduction of Edge Crossings in Force-Directed Layouts. In Proceedings of the 2016 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion. ACM, 89--90.
[9]
Hongmei He and Ondrej Sykora. 2004. New circular drawing algorithms. In Workshop on Information Technologies-Applications and Theory, Slovakia.
[10]
John H Holland. 1992. Adaptation in natural and artificial systems: an introductory analysis with applications to biology, control, and artificial intelligence. MIT press.
[11]
Danny Holten. 2006. Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 12, 5 (2006), 741--748.
[12]
Danny Holten and Jarke J. van Wijk. 2009. Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization. Comput. Graph. Forum 28, 3 (2009), 983--990.
[13]
Donald H. House, Alethea S. Bair, and Colin Ware. 2006. An approach to the perceptual optimization of complex visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 12, 4 (2006), 509--521.
[14]
Christophe Hurter, Ozan Ersoy, and Alexandru Telea. 2012. Graph Bundling by Kernel Density Estimation. Comput. Graph. Forum 31, 3 (2012), 865--874.
[15]
Anil K Jain, M Narasimha Murty, and Patrick J Flynn. 1999. Data clustering: a review. ACM computing surveys (CSUR) 31, 3 (1999), 264--323.
[16]
Robert Kosara. 2007. Visualization Criticism - The Missing Link Between Information Visualization and Art. In 11th International Conference on Information Visualisation, IV 2007, 2--6 July 2007, Zürich, Switzerland. 631--636.
[17]
Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere. 2007. Towards a Model of Information Aesthetics in Information Visualization. In 11th International Conference on Information Visualisation, IV 2007, 2--6 July 2007, Zürich, Switzerland. 87--92.
[18]
Erkki Mäkinen. 1988. On circular layoutsfk. International Journal of Computer Mathematics 24, 1 (1988), 29--37.
[19]
Vsevolod Peysakhovich, Christophe Hurter, and Alexandru Telea. 2015. Attribute-driven edge bundling for general graphs with applications in trail analysis. In 2015 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, PacificVis 2015, Hangzhou, China, April 14--17, 2015. 39--46.
[20]
Evgheni Polisciuc, Pedro Cruz, Hugo Amaro, Catarina Maçãs, and Penousal Machado. 2016. Flow Map of Products Transported among Warehouses and Supermarkets. In Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2016) - Volume 2: IVAPP, Rome, Italy, February 27--29, 2016. 179--188.
[21]
Andrew Pressley. 2010. Elementary Differential Geometry. Springer London.
[22]
Carolyn Salimun, Helen C. Purchase, David R. Simmons, and Stephen A. Brewster. 2010. The effect of aesthetically pleasing composition on visual search performance. In Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland, October 16--20, 2010. 422--431.
[23]
Janet M Six and Ioannis G Tollis. 1999. Circular drawings of biconnected graphs. In Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experimentation. Springer, 57--73.
[24]
J Utech, J Branke, H Schmeck, and P Eades. 1998. An evolutionary algorithm for drawing directed graphs. In Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Imaging Science, Systems and Technology. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 154--160.
[25]
Colin Ware, Helen Purchase, Linda Colpoys, and Matthew McGill. 2002. Cognitive Measurements of Graph Aesthetics. Information Visualization 1, 2 (June 2002), 103--110.
[26]
Hsiang-Yun Wu, Shigeo Takahashi, Chun-Cheng Lin, and Hsu-Chun Yen. 2011. A zone-based approach for placing annotation labels on metro maps. In International Symposium on Smart Graphics. Springer, 91--102.

Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Exploring the Design Space of Aesthetics with the Repertory Grid TechniqueGraph Drawing and Network Visualization10.1007/978-3-030-68766-3_24(308-323)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
  • (2018)An Evolutionary Algorithm for an Optimization Model of Edge BundlingInformation10.3390/info90701549:7(154)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2018

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '17: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
July 2017
1934 pages
ISBN:9781450349390
DOI:10.1145/3067695
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 July 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. aesthetics
  2. circular network layout
  3. edge bundling
  4. genetic algorithms
  5. graph drawing

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

GECCO '17
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)5
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Exploring the Design Space of Aesthetics with the Repertory Grid TechniqueGraph Drawing and Network Visualization10.1007/978-3-030-68766-3_24(308-323)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
  • (2018)An Evolutionary Algorithm for an Optimization Model of Edge BundlingInformation10.3390/info90701549:7(154)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2018

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media