NNP-NET: Accelerating t-SNE Graph Drawing for Very Large Graphs by Neural Networks

Abstract

tsNET is a recent graph drawing (GD) method that creates high quality layouts but suffers from a very high runtime. We present a new GD method, NNP-NET, which reduces tsNET's time complexity to generate layouts for very large graphs in seconds. Additionally, we extend tsNET to support drawing graphs with edge weights. We accomplish this by replacing tsNET's t-SNE projection with Neural Network Projection (NNP), a fast dimensionality reduction (DR) method that can imitate any given DR method. Our experiments show that NNP-NET gets good quality results when compared to other state-of-the art GD methods while yielding a better computational scalability.