I was using Jung ( http://jung.sourceforge.net/ ) to visualize page rank and found it a little slow and difficult to scale it beyond 100 nodes. I was wondering what other tools people use for network / social network analysis and visualization.
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$\begingroup$ May I ask what this has to do with cs theory? $\endgroup$ – Lev Reyzin♦ May 19 '11 at 17:56
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1$\begingroup$ Visualising of large chunks of information is important for cs theroy, its also its own entire research field. $\endgroup$ – steve May 22 '11 at 18:10
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FLARE produces rather beautiful graphs and visualisations, and in fact I have used it for just this purpose with a small private social network. In particular you may want to look at "layouts" in the demo as it gives an excellent demonstration of transforming between different ways of drawing the graph.
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Check this link for pointers to several network analysis and visualization tools. They include:
Also, check Graphviz Graph Visualization Software from AT&T Labs and Cytoscape : An Open Source Platform for Complex-Network Analysis and Visualization. Cytoscape is one of the best tools and it is backed by a consortium of corporations and academic institutions.
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2$\begingroup$ do you have any recommendations as to which of these are better for different applications, or even some of the advantages/disadvantages of them? $\endgroup$ – Joshua Grochow Oct 17 '10 at 18:31
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$\begingroup$ I would recommend Cytoscape for molecular and systems biology research. However, it can be used for general network analysis and visualization. $\endgroup$ – Mohammad Al-Turkistany Oct 17 '10 at 19:27
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1$\begingroup$ Amazing and easy to get something up and running fast. $\endgroup$ – Dave Clarke May 17 '11 at 13:04
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$\begingroup$ That look seems to go to something unrelated now... $\endgroup$ – UuDdLrLrSs Apr 26 '17 at 17:38
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I have used the Java version of Flare called Prefuse and I have been quite happy with it. The "Physics-based force-directed graph layout algorithm" is quite fine.
In my research I did not find any useful tools of the published large graph visualizations (http://blog.vrist.dk/2010/04/15/reading-up-on-dynamic-graph-layout/)
I have a couple of videos of the toolkit in action here: http://blobvis.appspot.com/screenshots
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I've been toying with a combination of R, to do the analysis and some visualisation,
and gephi, for visualisation. R seems very powerful, with the right abstractions for doing statistical manipulations. It has three packages (at least) for doing social network analysis, sna, igraph, and network. Gephi has a nice feature for drawing dynamic social networks, but I haven't fully explored its capabilities yet.
