U.: Graph drawing by classical multidimensional scaling: new perspectives

Abstract. With shortest-path distances as input, classical multidimen-sional scaling can be regarded as a spectral graph drawing algorithm, and recent approximation techniques make it scale to very large graphs. In comparison with other methods, however, it is considered inflexible and prone to degenerate layouts for some classes of graphs. We want to challenge this belief by demonstrating that the method can be flexibly adapted to provide focus+context layouts. Moreover, we propose an alternative instantiation that appears to be more suitable for graph drawing and prevents certain degeneracies.