A Quantitative Comparison of Stress-Minimization Approaches for Offline Dynamic Graph Drawing

In dynamic graph drawing, the input is a sequence of graphs for which a sequence of layouts is to be generated such that the quality of individual layouts is balanced with layout stability over time. Qualitatively different extensions of drawing algorithms for static graphs to the dynamic case have been proposed, but little is known about their relative utility. We report on a quantitative study comparing the three prototypical extensions via their adaptation for the stress-minimization framework. While some findings are more subtle, the linking approach connecting consecutive instances of the same vertex is found to be the overall method of choice.