Initial Placement for Fruchterman--Reingold Force Model With Coordinate Newton Direction

Abstract: Graph drawing is a fundamental task in information visualization, with the Fruchterman--Reingold (FR) force model being one of the most popular choices. We can interpret this visualization task as a continuous optimization problem, which can be solved using the FR algorithm, the original algorithm for this force model, or the L-BFGS algorithm, a quasi-Newton method. However, both algorithms suffer from twist problems and are computationally expensive per iteration, which makes achieving high-quality visualizations for large-scale graphs challenging. In this research, we propose a new initial placement based on the stochastic coordinate descent to accelerate the optimization process. We first reformulate the problem as a discrete optimization problem using a hexagonal lattice and then iteratively update a randomly selected vertex along the coordinate Newton direction. We can use the FR or L-BFGS algorithms to obtain the final placement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach through experiments, highlighting the potential of coordinate descent methods for graph drawing tasks. Additionally, we suggest combining our method with other graph drawing techniques for further improvement. We also discuss the relationship between our proposed method and broader graph-related applications.