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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2026.41

Size Should Not Matter: Evaluating Network Visualizations with Stress (Poster Abstract)

Authors: Reyan Ahmed, Cesim Erten, Stephen Kobourov, Jonah Lotz, Jacob Miller, and Hamlet Taraz

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 396, 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2026)

Abstract

The normalized stress metric is widely used to assess graph drawing quality, measuring how closely distances between vertices in a layout match their graph-theoretic distances. This metric is a standard for both evaluation and optimization in many popular graph layout algorithms. However, normalized stress is highly sensitive to the scale (size) of the drawing, leading to potentially misleading comparisons between layouts produced by different algorithms. Uniformly scaling a layout can significantly alter stress values without changing the underlying structure, even to the extent that a clearly superior layout can appear to have a higher stress score than a random layout. Although this issue is recognized within the network visualization community, it is rarely addressed with sufficient detail in publications, resulting in critical calculation errors in recent studies. In this paper, we systematically examine various stress metrics used in the literature and demonstrate that commonly used metrics are affected by layout scale, undermining their reliability for comparison. We identify a scale-invariant alternative and propose scale-normalized stress for fair stress-based evaluation.

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Reyan Ahmed, Cesim Erten, Stephen Kobourov, Jonah Lotz, Jacob Miller, and Hamlet Taraz. Size Should Not Matter: Evaluating Network Visualizations with Stress (Poster Abstract). In 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 396, pp. 41:1-41:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{ahmed_et_al:LIPIcs.GD.2026.41,
  author =	{Ahmed, Reyan and Erten, Cesim and Kobourov, Stephen and Lotz, Jonah and Miller, Jacob and Taraz, Hamlet},
  title =	{{Size Should Not Matter: Evaluating Network Visualizations with Stress}},
  booktitle =	{34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2026)},
  pages =	{41:1--41:9},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-452-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{396},
  editor =	{L\"{o}ffler, Maarten and Miksch, Silvia},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2026.41},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-279363},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2026.41},
  annote =	{Keywords: Normalized stress, layout evaluation, scale-invariant metrics}
}

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Size Should Not Matter: Evaluating Network Visualizations with Stress (Poster Abstract)

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