Dimensionality reduction is a common method for analyzing and visualizing high-dimensional data across domains. Dimensionality-reduction algorithms involve complex optimizations and the reduced dimensions computed by these algorithms generally lack clear relation to the initial data dimensions. Therefore, interpreting and reasoning about dimensionality reductions can be difficult. In this work, we introduce two interaction techniques, and , for reasoning dynamically about scatter plots of dimensionally reduced data. We also contribute two related visualization techniques, and to facilitate and enrich the effective use of the proposed interactions, which we integrate in a new tool called . To evaluate our techniques, we first analyze their time and accuracy performance across varying sample and dimension sizes. We then conduct a user study in which twelve data scientists use so as to assess the usefulness of the techniques in performing exploratory data analysis tasks. Results suggest that our visual interactions are intuitive and effective for exploring dimensionality reductions and generating hypotheses about the underlying data.
High-dimensional data can be converted to low-dimensional codes by training a multilayer neural network with a small central layer to reconstruct high-dimensional input vectors. Gradient descent can be used for fine-tuning the weights in such “autoencoder” networks, but this works well only if the initial weights are close to a good solution. We describe an effective way of initializing the weights that allows deep autoencoder networks to learn low-dimensional codes that work much better than principal components analysis as a tool to reduce the dimensionality of data.