Quality Metrics and Reordering Strategies for Revealing Patterns in BioFabric Visualizations

Visualizing relational data is crucial for understanding complex connections between entities in social networks, political affiliations, or biological interactions. Well-known representations like node-link diagrams and adjacency matrices offer valuable insights, but their effectiveness relies on the ability to identify patterns in the underlying topological structure. Reordering strategies and layout algorithms play a vital role in the visualization process since the arrangement of nodes, edges, or cells influences the visibility of these patterns. The BioFabric visualization combines elements of node-link diagrams and adjacency matrices, leveraging the strengths of both, the visual clarity of node-link diagrams and the tabular organization of adjacency matrices. A unique characteristic of BioFabric is the possibility to reorder nodes and edges separately. This raises the question of which combination of layout algorithms best reveals certain patterns. In this paper, we discuss patterns and anti-patterns in BioFabric, such as staircases or escalators, relate them to already established patterns, and propose metrics to evaluate their quality. Based on these quality metrics, we compared combinations of well-established reordering techniques applied to BioFabric with a well-known benchmark data set. Our experiments indicate that the edge order has a stronger influence on revealing patterns than the node layout. The results show that the best combination for revealing staircases is a barycentric node layout, together with an edge order based on node indices and length. Our research contributes a first building block for many promising future research directions, which we also share and discuss. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/9mt8r/?view_only=b7t0dfbe550e3404f83059afdc60184c6.