AdaptiveNav: Discovering Locally Interesting and Surprising Nodes in Large Graphs

Visualization is a powerful paradigm for exploratory data analysis. Visualizing large graphs, however, often results in a meaningless hairball. In this paper, we propose a different approach that helps the user adaptively explore large million-node graphs from a local perspective. For nodes that the user investigates, we propose to only show the neighbors with the most subjectively interesting neighborhoods. We contribute novel ideas to measure this interestingness in terms of how surprising a neighborhood is given the background distribution, as well as how well it fits the nodes the user chose to explore. We are currently designing and developing AdaptiveNav, a fast and scalable method for visually exploring large graphs. By implementing our above ideas, it allows users to look into the forest through its trees.