Inferring partial orders of nodes for hierarchical network layout

Wu, H.-Y.*; Takahashi, Shigeo*; Miyamura, Hiroko  ; Ozahata, Satoshi*; Nakao, Akihiro*

Extracting hierarchical structures from networks provides us with an effective means of visualizing them, especially when they contain complicated node connectivities such as those in traffic and distributed networks. This paper presents an algorithm for inferring such partial orders by optimizing the network hierarchies along flow paths that are given as input. We study several network examples to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach including course dependency charts, railway networks, and P2P networks.