An energy model for visual graph clustering

Abstract

We introduce an energy model whose minimum energy drawings reveal the clusters of the drawn graph. Here a cluster is a set of nodes with many internal edges and few edges to nodes outside the set. The drawings of the best-known force and energy models do not clearly show clusters for graphs whose diameter is small relative to the number of nodes. We formally characterize the minimum energy drawings of our energy model. This characterization shows in what sense the drawings separate clusters, and how the distance of separated clusters to the other nodes can be interpreted. © Springer-Verlag 2004.