Efficiently Visualizing Large Graphs

Abstract: Most existing graph visualization methods based on dimension reduction are limited to relatively small graphs due to performance issues. In this work, we propose a novel dimension reduction method for graph visualization, called t-Distributed Stochastic Graph Neighbor Embedding (t-SGNE). t-SGNE is specifically designed to visualize cluster structures in the graph. As a variant of the standard t-SNE method, t-SGNE avoids the time-consuming computations of pairwise similarity. Instead, it uses the neighbor structures of the graph to reduce the time complexity from quadratic to linear, thus supporting larger graphs. In addition, to suit t-SGNE, we combined Laplacian Eigenmaps with the shortest path algorithm in graphs to form the graph embedding algorithm ShortestPath Laplacian Eigenmaps Embedding (SPLEE). Performing SPLEE to obtain a high-dimensional embedding of the large-scale graph and then using t-SGNE to reduce its dimension for visualization, we are able to visualize graphs with up to 300K nodes and 1M edges within 5 minutes and achieve approximately 10% improvement in visualization quality. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Charlie-XIAO/embedding-visualization-test.