Exploring Social Networks: A Frequent Pattern Visualization Approach

Abstract

Social network analysis and mining aims to search for implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful relational information (e.g., social relationship) from social networks. A visual representation of the networks helps users to gain insights about the useful information mined from the networks. Many existing visualizers represent social networks as graphs. While the graphs depict pairwise connections between two social entities, they may not show the connection strength or the multi-entity relationship (e.g., coauthorship and collaboration frequency). In this paper, we propose a visualizer called SocialViz for providing users with frequency information on social relationship among multiple entities in the networks. SocialViz can serve as a standalone visualization tool, or as a complement to existing visualizers, for exploring social networks.