STATS401 Final Project: Into the Marvel Universe

Authors

Austen Li
Ziang Zhou
Jincheng He

Introduction

This is our final project for STATS401 22Spring@DKU. We explored the marvel characters datasets and conveyed several visualizations.

Poster

Connection Network

In this graph, we visualized the network of marvel characters connection. Each node in this graph is a character, and the edge between two nodes represents these two characters have a connection. Here the definition of two characters having the connection is that these two characters both appear in at least one certain event. The weight of the edge is the number of events that these two characters both appear.

To better visualize the graph and make it clearer, we randomized the edges of being showed. Originally there are 55256 edges, we chose the random rate to be 0.02, which means the graph only reveals 1105 edges.

By using this graph, we can compute different types of centrality such as betweenness centrality or closeness centrality.

[data] | [crawling code] | [visualization code]

Word Cloud: Marvel Character Descriptions

In this graph, we utilized the combined description of all characters that we obtained from the Marvel API and plotted this word cloud after filtering STOPWORDS. The language to generate this plot is python, and the libraries we adopted are wordcloud and plotly. You can zoom in and out of this word cloud to look closer.
[data] | [code]

2D Closeness Centrality + Reduced ResNet Embedding Vector

In this visualization, we plotted the closeness and betweenness centrality of each character versus their 2D image feature vector obtained by a pre-trained ResNet. The hue and the vertical axis represent each character’s closeness/betweenness centrality in the Marvel social network. Characters with the 30 highest closeness/betweenness centrality were marked in the 3D graph. User may rotate, zoom and pan the visualization and also hover over each point to see the character’s name and centrality scores.

3D Closeness Centrality + Reduced ResNet Embedding Vector

3D Betweenness Centrality + Reduced ResNet Embedding Vector

3D Scatter Plot: Marvel Characters’ Ability

In this graph, we visualized the Combat, Intelligence, and Durability properties of each Marvel character. Also, their Total ability is visualized by a colorbar on the leftmost. Plus, the alignment of each character can be identified by the symbol. You can click on different alignment options to filter out different groups of characters.
[data] | [code]