A unified data representation theory for network visualization, ordering and coarse-graining

István A. Kovács*, Réka Mizsei, Péter Csermely

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

Representation of large data sets became a key question of many scientific disciplines in the last decade. Several approaches for network visualization, data ordering and coarse-graining accomplished this goal. However, there was no underlying theoretical framework linking these problems. Here we show an elegant, information theoretic data representation approach as a unified solution of network visualization, data ordering and coarse-graining. The optimal representation is the hardest to distinguish from the original data matrix, measured by the relative entropy. The representation of network nodes as probability distributions provides an efficient visualization method and, in one dimension, an ordering of network nodes and edges. Coarse-grained representations of the input network enable both efficient data compression and hierarchical visualization to achieve high quality representations of larger data sets. Our unified data representation theory will help the analysis of extensive data sets, by revealing the large-scale structure of complex networks in a comprehensible form.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number13786
JournalScientific reports
Volume5
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 8 2015

Funding

We are grateful to the members of the LINK-group (www.linkgroup.hu) and E. Güney for useful discussions. This work was supported by the Hungarian National Research Fund under grant Nos. OTKA K109577, K115378 and K83314. The research of IAK was supported by the European Union and the State of Hungary, co-financed by the European Social Fund in the framework of TÁMOP 4.2.4. A/2-11-1-2012-0001 'National Excellence Program'.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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