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C. Schulz, M. Nöllenburg, H. Meyerhenke:
"Drawing Large Graphs by Multilevel Maxent-Stress Optimization";
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 24 (2018), 5; 1814 - 1827.

Drawing large graphs appropriately is an important step for the visual analysis of data from real-world networks. Here we present a novel multilevel algorithm to compute a graph layout with respect to the maxent-stress metric proposed by Gansner et al. (2013) that combines layout stress and entropy. As opposed to previous work, we do not solve the resulting linear systems of the maxent-stress metric with a typical numerical solver. Instead we use a simple local iterative scheme within a multilevel approach. To accelerate local optimization, we approximate long-range forces and use shared-memory parallelism. Our experiments validate the high potential of our approach, which is particularly appealing for dynamic graphs. In comparison to the previously best maxent-stress optimizer, which is sequential, our parallel implementation is on average 30 times faster already for static graphs (and still faster if executed on a single thread) while producing a comparable solution quality.

Layout, Stress, Computational modeling, Approximation algorithms, Linear systems, Force, Optimization

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2017.2689016

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_262806.pdf