Influent enables an analyst to visually and interactively “follow the money” or other transaction flow in significantly less time and reveals actors and potentially suspect behaviors that might otherwise go unnoticed. Summary visualization of transactional patterns and actor characteristics, interactive link expansion and dynamic entity clustering enable Influent to operate effectively at scale with big data sources, in any modern web browser. Influent has been applied to financial forensics and communications analysis with data sets with millions of entities and hundreds of millions of transactions.