Short plane support trees for hypergraphs

In many domains, the aggregation or classification of data elements leads to various intersecting sets. To allow for intuitive exploration and analysis of such data, set visualization aims to represent the elements and sets graphically. In more theoretical literature, such set systems are often referred to as hypergraphs. A support graph is a notion for drawing such a hypergraph, understood as a regular graph spanning the same vertices (elements), in which each hyperedge (set) induces a connected subgraph.

In this paper, we investigate finding a support graph of a hypergraph with fixed vertex locations under various constraints. We focus on enforcing planarity using a straight-line embedding, while minimizing the total length of the edges of the support graph, and consider the effect of the additional requirement that the support graph is acyclic.