A Comparative Analysis of Large-scale Network Visualization Tools

Network (Graph) is a powerful abstraction for representing underlying relations and structures in large complex systems. Network visualization provides a convenient way to explore and study such structures and reveal useful insights. There exist several network visualization tools; however, these vary in terms of scalability, analytics feature, and user-friendliness. Due to the huge growth of social, biological, and other scientific data, the corresponding network data is also large. Visualizing such large network poses another level of difficulty. In this paper, we identify several popular network visualization tools and provide a comparative analysis based on the features and operations these tools support. We demonstrate empirically how those tools scale to large networks. We also provide several case studies of visual analytics on large network data and assess performances of the tools. We show both runtime and memory efficiency of the tools while using layout algorithms and other network analysis methods.