Visualizing Uncertainty in Non-linear Projections with Ensembles

A flowchart depicting ensembling with multiple projections. A small scatterplot is on the left with the title "high-dimensional data". There is a solid arrow from that scatterplot to multiple overlapping 2D projections of a real dataset with the title "generate multiple projections". There is also a dotted arrow between the two with the title "perturb with noise or sampling". Finally, there is an arrow from the multiple projections to examples of our five ensemble visualizaiton types (median projection, small multiples, confidence ellipses, movement lines, and KDE + binned points) with the title "visualize as an ensemble".
Visualizing ensembles of non-linear projections reveals uncertainty lost in individual outputs. We generate several projections for the same dataset to identify how they can change run-to-run. To avoid stable but spurious projections, we optionally perturb input data by adding noise or subsampling. Finally, we explore five ensemble visualization methods to communicate variability.
Abstract
Widely used non-linear dimensionality reduction (NLDR) methods such as UMAP and t-SNE are stochastic--repeated runs on the same data can produce different low-dimensional projections. In this paper, we explore two problems related to projection variability: on some datasets clusters, structure, and outliers may change run-to-run, and on others projections can be extremely stable when overfitting noise. To address the first problem, we propose visualizing the median of multiple NLDR outputs rather than relying on individual projections. To address the second, we perturb input data before creating consensus embeddings. We find that taking the median of multiple projections performs comparably to individual runs on multiple quality metrics, while increasing perturbation emphasizes global over local structure. We show through a set of exploratory visualizations that even relatively simple ensemble presentations can be used to better communicate the reliability of projection patterns
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Khoury Vis Lab — Northeastern University
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