title: How to visualize a large network in R?
body: <p>Network visualizations become common in science in practice. But as networks are increasing in size, common visualizations become less useful. There are simply too many nodes/vertices and links/edges. Often visualization efforts end up in producing "hairballs".</p>
  
  <p>Some new approaches have been proposed to overcome this issue, e.g.:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Edge bundling: 
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/divided-edge-bundling" rel="noreferrer">http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/divided-edge-bundling</a> or</li>
  <li><a href="https://gephi.org/tag/edge-bundling/" rel="noreferrer">https://gephi.org/tag/edge-bundling/</a></li>
  </ul></li>
  <li>Hierarchial edge bundling:
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://graphics.cs.illinois.edu/sites/graphics.dev.engr.illinois.edu/files/edgebundles.pdf" rel="noreferrer">http://graphics.cs.illinois.edu/sites/graphics.dev.engr.illinois.edu/files/edgebundles.pdf</a></li>
  </ul></li>
  <li>Group Attributes Layout: 
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://wiki.cytoscape.org/Cytoscape_3/UserManual" rel="noreferrer">http://wiki.cytoscape.org/Cytoscape_3/UserManual</a></li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16390221/how-to-make-grouped-layout-in-igraph">How to make grouped layout in igraph?</a></li>
  </ul></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I am sure that there are many more approaches. Thus, my question is: 
  <strong>How to overcome the hairball issue, i.e. how to visualize large networks by using R?</strong></p>
  
  <p>Here is some code that simulates an exemplary network:</p>
  
  <pre><code># Load packages
  lapply(c("devtools", "sna", "intergraph", "igraph", "network"), install.packages)
  library(devtools)
  devtools::install_github(repo="ggally", username="ggobi")
  lapply(c("sna", "intergraph", "GGally", "igraph", "network"), 
         require, character.only=T)
  
  # Set up data
  set.seed(123)
  g &lt;- barabasi.game(1000)
  
  # Plot data
  g.plot &lt;- ggnet(g, mode = "fruchtermanreingold")
  g.plot
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/dXvVi.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>This questions is related to
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/238724/visualizing-undirected-graph-thats-too-large-for-graphviz">Visualizing Undirected Graph That&#39;s Too Large for GraphViz?</a>. However, here I am searching not for general software recommendations but for <strong>concrete examples (using the data provided above) which techniques help to make a good visualization of a large network by using R</strong> (comparable to the examples in this thread: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7714677/r-scatterplot-with-too-many-points">R: Scatterplot with too many points</a>). </p>