NNP-NET: Accelerating t-SNE Graph Drawing for Large Static and Dynamic Graphs by Neural Networks

Among recent graph drawing (GD) methods, tsNET creates high quality layouts but suffers from a very high runtime due to its underlying reliance on the t-SNE projection technique. We address this problem by presenting NNP-NET, a method that adapts NNP, a projection technique that can project high-dimensional datasets linearly in the data size, to handle both unweighted and weighted graphs, with layout quality being very close to the ground-truth tsNET. We also exploit NNP's built-in out-of-sample ability to enable NNP-NET to project time-dependent (dynamic) graphs while striking a good balance between layout stability and good layout quality. We show experiments that outline how NNP-NET can handle very large graphs – up to 50 million nodes and 108 million edges faster than all other comparable methods we are aware of while also yielding good quality metric values.