Interactive Bicluster Aggregation in Bipartite Graphs

Exploring coordinated relationships is important for sense making of data in various fields, such as intelligence analysis. To support such investigations, visual analysis tools use biclustering to mine relationships in bipartite graphs and visualize the resulting biclusters with standard graph visualization techniques. Due to overlaps among biclusters, such visualizations can be cluttered (e.g., with many edge crossings), when there are a large number of biclusters. Prior work attempted to resolve this problem by automatically ordering nodes in a bipartite graph. However, visual clutter is still a serious problem, since the number of displayed biclusters remains unchanged. We propose bicluster aggregation as an alternative approach, and have developed two methods of interactively merging biclusters. These interactive bicluster aggregations help organize similar biclusters and reduce the number of displayed biclusters. Initial expert feedback indicates potential usefulness of these techniques in practice.