title: Drawing Large Graphs by Multilevel Maxent-Stress Optimization.
abstract: 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.
authors.forename: Henning
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Meyerhenke
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nollenburg
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schulz