An Extended Uniform Placement of Alters on Spherical Surface (U-PASS) Method for Visualizing General Networks

Network visualization plays an important role in exploring information about network nodes and structure. Recently, a new network visualization method, namely the Uniform Placement of Alters on Spherical Surface (U-PASS), was proposed for ego-centric networks. In this work, we extend the U-PASS method for visualizing a general undirected unweighted network, which consists of the edges between nodes, network clusters, and some nodes that are not neighbors to the ego. We develop a new criterion that can quantify the degree of uniformity of the network with a target node as the ego. The performance comparison to several state-of-the-art methods show the our extended method performs better in terms of the uniformity of node scattering on the spherical surface.