Faster Force-Directed Graph Drawing with the Well-Separated Pair Decomposition

Abstract

AbstractThe force-directed paradigm is one of the few generic approaches to drawing graphs. Since force-directed algorithms can be extended easily, they are used frequently. Most of these algorithms are, however, quite slow on large graphs as they compute a quadratic number of forces in each iteration. We speed up this computation by using an approximation based on the well-separated pair decomposition.We perform experiments on a large number of graphs and show that we can strongly reduce the runtime—even on graphs with less then a hundred vertices—without a significant influence on the quality of the drawings (in terms of number of crossings and deviation in edge lengths).KeywordsWell-separated Pair Decomposition (WSPD)Force-directed AlgorithmForce-directed Graph Drawing AlgorithmCurrent Vertex PositionSplit TreeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.