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  1. Data analysts commonly utilize statistics to summarize large datasets. While it is often sufficient to explore only the summary statistics of a dataset (e.g., min/mean/max), Anscombe's Quartet demonstrates how such statistics can be misleading. We consider a similar problem in the context of graph mining. To study the relationships between different graph properties and summary statistics, we examine low-order non-isomorphic graphs and provide a simple visual analytics system to explore correlations across multiple graph properties. However, for larger graphs, studying the entire space quickly becomes intractable. We use different random graph generation methods to further look into the distribution of graph properties for higher order graphs and investigate the impact of various sampling methodologies. We also describe a method for generating many graphs that are identical over a number of graph properties and statistics yet are clearly different and identifiably distinct. 
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  2. null (Ed.)
    In the classical Steiner tree problem, given an undirected, connected graph G =( V , E ) with non-negative edge costs and a set of terminals T ⊆ V , the objective is to find a minimum-cost tree E &prime ⊆ E that spans the terminals. The problem is APX-hard; the best-known approximation algorithm has a ratio of ρ = ln (4)+ε < 1.39. In this article, we study a natural generalization, the multi-level Steiner tree (MLST) problem: Given a nested sequence of terminals T ℓ ⊂ … ⊂ T 1 ⊆ V , compute nested trees E ℓ ⊆ … ⊆ E 1 ⊆ E that span the corresponding terminal sets with minimum total cost. The MLST problem and variants thereof have been studied under various names, including Multi-level Network Design, Quality-of-Service Multicast tree, Grade-of-Service Steiner tree, and Multi-tier tree. Several approximation results are known. We first present two simple O (ℓ)-approximation heuristics. Based on these, we introduce a rudimentary composite algorithm that generalizes the above heuristics, and determine its approximation ratio by solving a linear program. We then present a method that guarantees the same approximation ratio using at most 2ℓ Steiner tree computations. We compare these heuristics experimentally on various instances of up to 500 vertices using three different network generation models. We also present several integer linear programming formulations for the MLST problem and compare their running times on these instances. To our knowledge, the composite algorithm achieves the best approximation ratio for up to ℓ = 100 levels, which is sufficient for most applications, such as network visualization or designing multi-level infrastructure. 
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  3. In Lombardi drawings of graphs, edges are represented as circular arcs and the edges incident on vertices have perfect angular resolution. It is known that not every planar graph has a planar Lombardi drawing. We give an example of a planar 3-tree that has no planar Lombardi drawing and we show that all outerpaths do have a planar Lombardi drawing. Further, we show that there are graphs that do not even have any Lombardi drawing at all. With this in mind, we generalize the notion of Lombardi drawings to that of (smooth) k-Lombardi drawings, in which each edge may be drawn as a (differentiable) sequence of k circular arcs; we show that every graph has a smooth 2-Lombardi drawing and every planar graph has a smooth planar 3-Lombardi drawing. We further investigate related topics connecting planarity and Lombardi drawings. 
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