GhostUMAP: Measuring Pointwise Instability in Dimensionality Reduction
2024 (English)Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Although many dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques employ stochastic methods for computational efficiency, such as negative sampling or stochastic gradient descent, their impact on the projection has been underexplored. In this work, we investigate how such stochasticity affects the stability of projections and present a novel DR technique, GhostUMAP, to measure the pointwise instability of projections. Our idea is to introduce clones of data points, "ghosts", into UMAP’s layout optimization process. Ghosts are designed to be completely passive: they do not affect any others but are influenced by attractive and repulsive forces from the original data points. After a single optimization run, GhostUMAP can capture the projection instability of data points by measuring the variance with the projected positions of their ghosts. We also present a successive halving technique to reduce the computation of GhostUMAP. Our results suggest that Ghost-UMAP can reveal unstable data points with a reasonable computational overhead.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2024. p. 161-165
Series
2024 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), ISSN 2771-9537, E-ISSN 2771-9553
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-210371DOI: 10.1109/VIS55277.2024.00040ISBN: 9798350354867 (print)ISBN: 9798350354850 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-210371DiVA, id: diva2:1919385
Conference
IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 13-18 October, 2024
Funder
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, t KAW 2019.00242024-12-092024-12-092024-12-17Bibliographically approved