mode

type: string, default: major

Technique for optimizing the layout.

• For neato, if mode="major", neato uses stress majorization.
• If mode="KK", neato uses a 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.
• If mode="sgd", neato uses a version of the stochastic gradient descent 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.)

For sfdp, the default is mode="spring", which corresponds to using a spring-electrical model. Setting mode="maxent" causes a similar model to be run but one that also takes into account edge lengths specified by the len attribute.

• Graphs