DiffLens: A Visualization System to Explore Local Differences in Graph Sampling

Graph sampling techniques have been widely used to simplify network computation and visualization, which also results in inevitable differences between the sampled networks and the original networks in terms of nodes, edges and structures. Investigating such differences can inform graph sampling technique users of the pros and cons of different techniques and select the appropriate one, and can also help graph sampling developers evaluate their own technique. However, there are still no systematic ways to achieve such a goal. This paper fills this research gap by first proposing systematic and generic quantitative measures to quantify three categories of graph differences (i.e., neighbor-based, path-based, and structure-based). Built upon this, we further propose DiffLens, a novel visualization system to help graph sampling developers and users intuitively explore local differences at different regions of their interest within a sampled graph, where three new lens-based visual designs are presented to display the neighbor-based, path-based, and structure-based differences respectively. We conducted two case studies and a user study using real-world network datasets to evaluate DiffLens. The results confirmed its effectiveness and usability in helping users explore local differences and compare different graph sampling strategies.