mode

Technique for optimizing the layout

type: string, default: major

neato supports modes:

  • mode="major": neato uses stress majorization1.
  • mode="KK": neato uses the Kamada-Kawai2 version of the gradient descent method. KK is sometimes appreciably faster for small (number of nodes < 100) graphs. A significant disadvantage is that KK may cycle.
  • mode="sgd": neato uses a version of the Stochastic Gradient Descent3 method. sgd's advantage is faster and more reliable convergence than both the previous methods, while sgd's disadvantage is that it runs in a fixed number of iterations and may require larger values of maxiter in some graphs.

There are two experimental modes in neato:

  • mode="hier", which adds a top-down directionality similar to the layout used in dot, and
  • mode="ipsep", which allows the graph to specify minimum vertical and horizontal distances between nodes. (See the sep attribute.)

  1. Gansner, E.R., Koren, Y., North, S. (2005). Graph Drawing by Stress Majorization. In: Pach, J. (eds) Graph Drawing. GD 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3383. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. ↩︎

  2. Tomihisa Kamada, Satoru Kawai, An algorithm for drawing general undirected graphs, Information Processing Letters, Volume 31, Issue 1, 1989, Pages 7-15. ↩︎

  3. J. X. Zheng, S. Pawar and D. F. M. Goodman, "Graph Drawing by Stochastic Gradient Descent," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 25, no. 9, pp. 2738-2748, 1 Sept. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2859997. ↩︎

Valid on:
  • Graphs

Note: neato only.

Search the Graphviz codebase for "mode"

Last modified July 28, 2024: Replace all Hugo 'ref's with 'relref's (bbef86a)