让模糊数据点分裂投影,更真实展现高维邻域结构
When One Point Is Not Enough: Addressing Ambiguous Instances in Dimensionality Reduction by Splitting

- 用图方法识别高维中相似却属于不同邻域的模糊点
- 将模糊点拆成多个投影点,分别放入对应邻域
- 适合需要精确局部结构分析的数据可视化场景
降维(DR)广泛用于高维数据可视化。其核心任务之一是发现邻域结构,依赖于投影结果中的细粒度局部信息。然而,降维本质上是损失性过程,无法完全保留高维关系,导致投影中出现视觉伪影。本文指出一种常被忽视的伪影来源:模糊实例。这些实例在高维空间中与多个相互不相似的邻域高度相似。标准降维方法只能将每个实例映射为一个点,因此只能将其置于一个邻域(或完全不放置),导致其邻域结构部分失真,称为‘部分邻域嵌入’。本文提出一种基于图的方法,识别模糊实例,并在投影中将其复制为多个点,每个副本置于其对应的邻域中。实验采用UMAP,但该方法也适用于其他基于局部图的降维技术。结果显示,该方法揭示了投影中此前隐藏的邻域归属关系,显著减少部分邻域嵌入现象,并通过定量分析得到验证。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Dimensionality Reduction (DR) methods are widely used to visualize high-dimensional data. One key task in DR-based analysis is discovering neighborhoods, which relies on analyzing the fine-grained local structure of a projection. However, DR is an inherently lossy process; no technique can perfectly preserve the high-dimensional relationships, and projections therefore contain visual artifacts. In this paper, we highlight a typically overlooked source of visual artifacts: ambiguous instances. These are instances that are highly similar to multiple mutually dissimilar neighborhoods in the high-dimensional space. Standard DR methods cannot faithfully project such instances, since each data instance is mapped to a single point in the visual space. As a result, such an instance is placed in only one of its neighborhoods (or in none at all), so only part of its neighborhood structure is represented. We call this distortion partial neighborhood embedding. In this paper, we introduce a graph-based approach that identifies ambiguous instances and replicates them as multiple points in the projection, placing each copy within its respective neighborhood. We use UMAP for our results, but our approach also generalizes to other local graph-based DR techniques. We show that our approach reveals previously hidden neighborhood memberships in projections and reduces partial neighborhood embedding across multiple examples, and is further supported by quantitative analyses.
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