A Comparative Study Of Large-Scale Network Data Visualization Tools

One of the most important parts of Data Analysis is Data Visualization [15]. The easy thing about Data Visualization is that there are hundreds of ways to do it, one better than the other. Ironically, however, it is difficult to choose the right tool for the job. This can be a concern because it is really important to know which tool is best depending on the resources we have. This thesis tries to answer that question – to an extent. In this thesis, I have tried to compare three Data Visualization tools: Gephi, Pajek and NodeXL. I have mainly discussed what each tool can do, what each tool is best at, and when to and when not to use each tool. Therefore, using the right tool can not only save us a lot of time by making the task easy and get the work done using a minimal number of resources, but also help to get the best results. The comparison is based on what Visualization features each tool has, how each tool computes different graph features, and how Compatible and Scalable each tool is. In the process, I used different Network datasets and tried to calculate certain features of the graph and wrote the findings. The end report discusses which tool can be best to use given the size of dataset, the problem we are trying to solve, the resources we have and the time we can spend