Self-Organizing Maps for Drawing Large Graphs

Self-organizing maps (SOM) are unsupervised, competitive neural networks used to project high-dimensional data onto a low-dimensial space. In this article we show how SOM can be sued to draw graphs in the plane. The SOM-based approach to graph drawing, which belongs to the general class of force-directed algorithms, allows the drawing of arbitrary weighted graphs. It is particularly efficient to draw large graphs and can be used as a preprocessing step before application of a more sophisticated method.<p> <p> <p> To appear in: Information Processing Letters.