

Show HN: Mars – A graph drawing tool for large graph visualization - marckhoury
https://github.com/marckhoury/mars

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fundamental
It looks like a pretty well put together project just based off of what is in
the readme. While I don't have any immediately applicable input I could
definitely see this being useful in trying to visualize some of the graph
theoretic representations of intermediate values within some manifold learning
algorithms (and there certainly could be enough data points that this graphviz
alone would be non-feasible (though sfdp might be if I had read those docs
right)).

From the paper, it is interesting how different the results of sfdp and mars
look like.

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marckhoury
Thanks, I put a fair bit of effort into cleaning it up!

Mars and sfdp take very different approaches to graph layouts, attempting the
embed the graph metric (mars) vs keeping your neighbors close while pushing
everyone else away (sfdp). As a result the drawings look very different and
emphasize different features of the graph. We're not trying to say that one
gives a better drawing than the other, but that here are two techniques that
scale and produce different drawings, one of which may give a better
visualization of your data. However one clear advantage of mars over sfdp is
mars' ability to easily incorporate edge weights.

You did read the documentation right. Sfdp is just as scalable, if not more
so, as mars. Although I've never run mars for as long and on as powerful of
machines as Yifan has run sfdp.

