Speed Up Graph Drawing for Social Network Visualization

Though classical forced-directed algorithms have many advantages on graph drawing, such as good-quality results, flexibility, simplicity, etc., the high running time makes them impractical to real applications. To this end, we propose a community-based approach to speed up graph drawing for social networks under the assumption that the position of a vertex in the graph is mainly determined by the vertexes which are in the same community with it. Experiments indicate that, comparing with the classical force-direct algorithm, our approach can significantly reduce the running time without the loss of graph readability.