Ben Jacobsen

Markus Wallinger, Ben Jacobsen, Stephen Kobourov et al.

Set systems are used to model data that naturally arises in many contexts: social networks have communities, musicians have genres, and patients have symptoms. Visualizations that accurately reflect the information in the underlying set system make it possible to identify the set elements, the sets themselves, and the relationships between the sets. In static contexts, such as print media or infographics, it is necessary to capture this information without the help of interactions. With this in mind, we consider three different systems for medium-sized set data, LineSets, EulerView, and MetroSets, and report the results of a controlled human-subjects experiment comparing their effectiveness. Specifically, we evaluate the performance, in terms of time and error, on tasks that cover the spectrum of static set-based tasks. We also collect and analyze qualitative data about the three different visualization systems. Our results include statistically significant differences, suggesting that MetroSets performs and scales better.

Ben Jacobsen, Markus Wallinger, Stephen Kobourov et al.

We propose MetroSets, a new, flexible online tool for visualizing set systems using the metro map metaphor. We model a given set system as a hypergraph $\mathcal{H} = (V, \mathcal{S})$, consisting of a set $V$ of vertices and a set $\mathcal{S}$, which contains subsets of $V$ called hyperedges. Our system then computes a metro map representation of $\mathcal{H}$, where each hyperedge $E$ in $\mathcal{S}$ corresponds to a metro line and each vertex corresponds to a metro station. Vertices that appear in two or more hyperedges are drawn as interchanges in the metro map, connecting the different sets. MetroSets is based on a modular 4-step pipeline which constructs and optimizes a path-based hypergraph support, which is then drawn and schematized using metro map layout algorithms. We propose and implement multiple algorithms for each step of the MetroSet pipeline and provide a functional prototype with easy-to-use preset configurations. Furthermore, using several real-world datasets, we perform an extensive quantitative evaluation of the impact of different pipeline stages on desirable properties of the generated maps, such as octolinearity, monotonicity, and edge uniformity.