Hypergraph drawing by force-directed placement

Abstract

We propose a family of algorithms that transform a hypergraph drawing problem into a graph drawing problem and leverage force-directed graph drawing algorithms in order to draw hypergraphs. We propose and discuss a number of criteria to evaluate the quality of the drawings from the points of view of aesthetics and of visualization and analytics. We empirically and comparatively evaluate the quality of the drawings based on these criteria on both synthetic and real data sets. Experiments reveal that the algorithms are generally effective and the drawings generated are aesthetically pleasing.