Merge trees are a valuable tool in the scientific visualization of scalar
fields; however, current
methods for merge tree comparisons are computationally expensive, primarily
due to the exhaustive matching between tree nodes. To address this
challenge, we introduce the Merge Tree Neural Network (MTNN), a learned neural network model designed for merge
tree comparison. The MTNN enables rapid
and high-quality similarity computation. We first demonstrate how to train graph
neural networks, which emerged as effective encoders for graphs,
in order to produce embeddings of merge trees in vector spaces for
efficient similarity comparison. Next, we formulate the novel MTNN
model that further improves the similarity comparisons by integrating the
tree and node embeddings with a new topological attention mechanism. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on real-world data in different
domains and examine our model's generalizability across various datasets.
Our experimental analysis demonstrates our approach's superiority in
accuracy and efficiency. In particular, we speed up the prior
state-of-the-art by more than 100X on the benchmark datasets while
maintaining an error rate below 0.1%.