Scalable Readability Evaluation for Graph Layouts: 2D Geometric Distributed Algorithms

TL;DR

This paper introduces distributed algorithms for scalable graph readability evaluation, significantly improving computation speed for large graphs and overcoming the limitations of previous machine learning methods.

Contribution

It presents novel distributed algorithms using Spark frameworks that efficiently evaluate graph readability metrics at scale.

Findings

Achieved up to 17x speedup for node occlusion evaluation.

Achieved up to 146x speedup for edge crossing evaluation.

Enabled practical large-scale graph readability assessment.

Abstract

Graphs, consisting of vertices and edges, are vital for representing complex relationships in fields like social networks, finance, and blockchain. Visualizing these graphs helps analysts identify structural patterns, with readability metrics-such as node occlusion and edge crossing-assessing layout clarity. However, calculating these metrics is computationally intensive, making scalability a challenge for large graphs. Without efficient readability metrics, layout generation processes-despite numerous studies focused on accelerating them-face bottleneck, making it challenging to select or produce optimized layouts swiftly. Previous approaches attempted to accelerate this process through machine learning models. Machine learning approaches aimed to predict readability scores from rendered images of graphs. While these models offered some improvement, they struggled with scalability and accuracy, especially for graphs with thousands of nodes. For instance, this approach requires substantial memory to process large images, as it relies on rendered images of the graph; graphs with more than 600 nodes cannot be inputted into the model, and errors can exceed 55% in some readability metrics due to difficulties in generalizing across diverse graph layouts. This study addresses these limitations by introducing scalable algorithms for readability evaluation in distributed environments, utilizing Spark's DataFrame and GraphFrame frameworks to efficiently manage large data volumes across multiple machines. Experimental results show that these distributed algorithms significantly reduce computation time, achieving up to a 17x speedup for node occlusion and a 146x improvement for edge crossing on large datasets. These enhancements make scalable graph readability evaluation practical and efficient, overcoming the limitations of previous machine-learning approaches.