VisML Lab Week 7 - CS-GY 9223 Fall 2025

VisML Lab Week 7 - CS-GY 9223 Fall 2025

Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction

Slides

The slides I showed this week can be found here.

Miscellaneous Notes

• Lab focused on dimensionality reduction techniques for high-dimensional data
• Next week: Deep Learning Visualization

Topics Covered

• We discussed various dimensionality reduction techniques, which are used to project high-dimensional data into a low-dimensional space while preserving the clusters from the high-dimensional space. These included:
  • Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
  • Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)
  • Sparse Random Projection
  • Locally Linear Embedding
  • t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE)
  • Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP)
• We also applied each of these methods to the MNIST dataset of hand-drawn digits, projecting the 784-dimensional MNIST vectors into both 2 and 3 dimensions and visualizing the results. The code we used to create these visualizations can be found in the lab slides.
• We discussed common pitfalls that can lead to misreadings of t-SNE plots

Further Reading

• This article contains an in-depth explanation of the interactive “MNIST Cube” visualization we discussed, as well as some animations of other clustering techniques
• This article breaks down the examples of common t-SNE plot pitfalls we looked at in more detail.
• This article compares t-SNE and UMAP with interactive visualizations.