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On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 03:17:51AM +0200, Carl Nordlund wrote:
> Contrary to spring-embedding, MDS have standardized measurements for the
> final stress values (for instance the Kruskal stress formula), which makes
> it far more universal and comparative than spring-embedders. So my main
> question is: why use spring-embedders at all? Why not use MDS for
> visualization purposes and discard spring-embedding techniques altogether?
> Any pro-spring-embedding advantages?


When using path-distances as dissimilarities and local
scaling, the objective function of MDS is exactly that
of the Kamada-Kawai spring-embedder variant.

For more on spring embedders and their relation with MDS see

  Drawing on Physical Analogies
  Chapter 4 in M. Kaufmann, D. Wagner (eds.)
  Drawing Graphs: Methods and Models
  Springer LNCS Tutorial 2025:71--86, 2001

which you can download from

  http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/~brandes/publications/b-dpa-01.ps.gz


Regards,

B.

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