No Arabic abstract
A first line of attack in exploratory data analysis is data visualization, i.e., generating a 2-dimensional representation of data that makes clusters of similar points visually identifiable. Standard Johnson-Lindenstrauss dimensionality reduction does not produce data visualizations. The t-SNE heuristic of van der Maaten and Hinton, which is based on non-convex optimization, has become the de facto standard for visualization in a wide range of applications. This work gives a formal framework for the problem of data visualization - finding a 2-dimensional embedding of clusterable data that correctly separates individual clusters to make them visually identifiable. We then give a rigorous analysis of the performance of t-SNE under a natural, deterministic condition on the ground-truth clusters (similar to conditions assumed in earlier analyses of clustering) in the underlying data. These are the first provable guarantees on t-SNE for constructing good data visualizations. We show that our deterministic condition is satisfied by considerably general probabilistic generative models for clusterable data such as mixtures of well-separated log-concave distributions. Finally, we give theoretical evidence that t-SNE provably succeeds in partially recovering cluster structure even when the above deterministic condition is not met.
Dimension reduction (DR) techniques such as t-SNE, UMAP, and TriMAP have demonstrated impressive visualization performance on many real world datasets. One tension that has always faced these methods is the trade-off between preservation of global structure and preservation of local structure: these methods can either handle one or the other, but not both. In this work, our main goal is to understand what aspects of DR methods are important for preserving both local and global structure: it is difficult to design a better method without a true understanding of the choices we make in our algorithms and their empirical impact on the lower-dimensional embeddings they produce. Towards the goal of local structure preservation, we provide several useful design principles for DR loss functions based on our new understanding of the mechanisms behind successful DR methods. Towards the goal of global structure preservation, our analysis illuminates that the choice of which components to preserve is important. We leverage these insights to design a new algorithm for DR, called Pairwise Controlled Manifold Approximation Projection (PaCMAP), which preserves both local and global structure. Our work provides several unexpected insights into what design choices both to make and avoid when constructing DR algorithms.
Modern datasets and models are notoriously difficult to explore and analyze due to their inherent high dimensionality and massive numbers of samples. Existing visualization methods which employ dimensionality reduction to two or three dimensions are often inefficient and/or ineffective for these datasets. This paper introduces t-SNE-CUDA, a GPU-accelerated implementation of t-distributed Symmetric Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) for visualizing datasets and models. t-SNE-CUDA significantly outperforms current implementations with 50-700x speedups on the CIFAR-10 and MNIST datasets. These speedups enable, for the first time, visualization of the neural network activations on the entire ImageNet dataset - a feat that was previously computationally intractable. We also demonstrate visualization performance in the NLP domain by visualizing the GloVe embedding vectors. From these visualizations, we can draw interesting conclusions about using the L2 metric in these embedding spaces. t-SNE-CUDA is publicly available athttps://github.com/CannyLab/tsne-cuda
We introduce an improved unsupervised clustering protocol specially suited for large-scale structured data. The protocol follows three steps: a dimensionality reduction of the data, a density estimation over the low dimensional representation of the data, and a final segmentation of the density landscape. For the dimensionality reduction step we introduce a parallelized implementation of the well-known t-Stochastic Neighbouring Embedding (t-SNE) algorithm that significantly alleviates some inherent limitations, while improving its suitability for large datasets. We also introduce a new adaptive Kernel Density Estimation particularly coupled with the t-SNE framework in order to get accurate density estimates out of the embedded data, and a variant of the rainfalling watershed algorithm to identify clusters within the density landscape. The whole mapping protocol is wrapped in the bigMap R package, together with visualization and analysis tools to ease the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the clustering.
T-SNE is a well-known approach to embedding high-dimensional data and has been widely used in data visualization. The basic assumption of t-SNE is that the data are non-constrained in the Euclidean space and the local proximity can be modelled by Gaussian distributions. This assumption does not hold for a wide range of data types in practical applications, for instance spherical data for which the local proximity is better modelled by the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution instead of the Gaussian. This paper presents a vMF-SNE embedding algorithm to embed spherical data. An iterative process is derived to produce an efficient embedding. The results on a simulation data set demonstrated that vMF-SNE produces better embeddings than t-SNE for spherical data.
With the rapid adoption of machine learning techniques for large-scale applications in science and engineering comes the convergence of two grand challenges in visualization. First, the utilization of black box models (e.g., deep neural networks) calls for advanced techniques in exploring and interpreting model behaviors. Second, the rapid growth in computing has produced enormous datasets that require techniques that can handle millions or more samples. Although some solutions to these interpretability challenges have been proposed, they typically do not scale beyond thousands of samples, nor do they provide the high-level intuition scientists are looking for. Here, we present the first scalable solution to explore and analyze high-dimensional functions often encountered in the scientific data analysis pipeline. By combining a new streaming neighborhood graph construction, the corresponding topology computation, and a novel data aggregation scheme, namely topology aware datacubes, we enable interactive exploration of both the topological and the geometric aspect of high-dimensional data. Following two use cases from high-energy-density (HED) physics and computational biology, we demonstrate how these capabilities have led to crucial new insights in both applications.