Hypergraph Drawing by Force-Directed Placement

We address the problem of drawing hypergraphs. We propose and evaluate a family of algorithms that transform a hypergraph drawing problem into a graph drawing problem. Each algorithm in the family relies on a different encoding of a hyperedge into a set of edges. The algorithms can then use any graph drawing algorithms. However, we here focus on the force-directed algorithms. We propose and discuss a number of criteria to evaluate the quality of the drawings from the points of view of aesthetics and of visualization and analytics. We also devise several metrics to quantify selected aspects. We empirically and comparatively evaluate the quality of the drawings with both synthetic and real data sets. The experiments reveal that the approach is practical, efficient and generally effective, and, more importantly, the drawings generated are not only aesthetically pleasing but also readable for the purpose of visualization and analytics.