Visualizing a large graph starts with a deceptively hard question: where should each node go? Force-directed layouts look good on small graphs but collapse into hairballs — and hours of computation — at scale.

The PPRviz approach

PPRviz positions nodes so that Euclidean distance on screen reflects personalized PageRank (PPR) proximity in the graph — a measure that captures multi-hop structure rather than just direct edges. The formulation admits efficient solvers: for large graphs, a multi-level scheme clusters the graph into supernodes, lays out the coarse structure, and lets users interactively drill down without ever computing a full dense layout.

Results

Across real graphs, PPRviz produces layouts that beat popular tools on standard aesthetic and neighborhood-preservation metrics, while scaling to graphs orders of magnitude larger than force-directed baselines can handle interactively.