Visualizing differences between two large graphs

Abstract

When working with graphs one often faces the problem of comparing two or more graphs. For example in biology, when two protein-protein interaction networks from closely related species have to be compared, the graphs can easily contain several hundred nodes and thousands of edges but very few differences. Our goal was to develop a software-tool that creates an overview of large graphs and maintains the structure but reduces the number of nodes and edges and enables the user to easily find and investigate the areas of interest. This problem has been considered in the past by various groups ([1], [2]) and different heuristics have been proposed. Here, we follow the concept proposed in [3]. For this work, we assume that the input-graphs are relatively large with small local differences and node correspondences are known. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.