Performance Compare and Optimization of Rectangular Treemap Layout Algorithms

Treemap is a very useful visualization approach for depicting hierarchical tree structure.However, a single treemap layout algorithm is not capable of showing complicated multi-variate data.In this paper, we make a survey on rectangular treemap layout algorithms, including Slice and Dice, Squarified, Pivot-by-middle, Pivot-by-size, Pivot-by-split-size, Strip, Spiral and Ordered-Squarified, as well as six indices for evaluating the layout performance (average of aspect ratio, continuity, readability, average of distance change, variance of distance changes and distance correlation).By conducting a set of experiments, we compare eight algorithms with respect to six indices, and give a detailed result analysis.We further propose a hybrid scheme, which can achieve the optimal performance, and also give a detailed result analysis after optimization.The results can be a reference when selecting treemap layout algorithm.