A User Study in Similarity Measures for Graph Drawing

The need for a similarity measure for comparing two drawings of graphs arises in problems such as interactive graph drawing and the indexing or browsing of large sets of graphs. Many applications have been based on intuitive ideas of what makes two drawings look similar — for example, the idea that vertex positions should not change much. In this paper, we formally define several of these intuitive ideas of similarity and present the results of a user study designed to evaluate how well these measures reflect human perception of similarity. Communicated by Michael Kaufmann: submitted February 2001;revised January 2002 and June 2002. Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants CCR– 9732327, CCR–0098068 and CDA–9703080, and by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant DAAH04-96-1-0013. Work completed while the first author was at Brown University. Bridgeman and Tamassia, Similarity Measures , JGAA, 6(3) 225-254 (2002) 226