VC: SNE and t-SNE, Who Is My Neighbour?

Many dimensionality reduction techniques attempt to preserve distances of the original data. However, it can be beneficial to focus on preserving the nearest neighbours for visualization. t-SNE[van der Maaten/Hinton 2008] abstracts away density and distance information. Since it preserves the neighbours, it often reveals the cluster structure more clearly than any other dimensionality reduction technique. t-SNE is really popular in many applications including life science.

Comparison