Wasserstein t-SNE

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Bachmann, Fynn, Hennig, Philipp, Kobak, Dmitry
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author Bachmann, Fynn
Hennig, Philipp
Kobak, Dmitry
author_facet Bachmann, Fynn
Hennig, Philipp
Kobak, Dmitry
contents Scientific datasets often have hierarchical structure: for example, in surveys, individual participants (samples) might be grouped at a higher level (units) such as their geographical region. In these settings, the interest is often in exploring the structure on the unit level rather than on the sample level. Units can be compared based on the distance between their means, however this ignores the within-unit distribution of samples. Here we develop an approach for exploratory analysis of hierarchical datasets using the Wasserstein distance metric that takes into account the shapes of within-unit distributions. We use t-SNE to construct 2D embeddings of the units, based on the matrix of pairwise Wasserstein distances between them. The distance matrix can be efficiently computed by approximating each unit with a Gaussian distribution, but we also provide a scalable method to compute exact Wasserstein distances. We use synthetic data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our Wasserstein t-SNE, and apply it to data from the 2017 German parliamentary election, considering polling stations as samples and voting districts as units. The resulting embedding uncovers meaningful structure in the data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2205_07531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wasserstein t-SNE
Bachmann, Fynn
Hennig, Philipp
Kobak, Dmitry
Machine Learning
Human-Computer Interaction
Scientific datasets often have hierarchical structure: for example, in surveys, individual participants (samples) might be grouped at a higher level (units) such as their geographical region. In these settings, the interest is often in exploring the structure on the unit level rather than on the sample level. Units can be compared based on the distance between their means, however this ignores the within-unit distribution of samples. Here we develop an approach for exploratory analysis of hierarchical datasets using the Wasserstein distance metric that takes into account the shapes of within-unit distributions. We use t-SNE to construct 2D embeddings of the units, based on the matrix of pairwise Wasserstein distances between them. The distance matrix can be efficiently computed by approximating each unit with a Gaussian distribution, but we also provide a scalable method to compute exact Wasserstein distances. We use synthetic data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our Wasserstein t-SNE, and apply it to data from the 2017 German parliamentary election, considering polling stations as samples and voting districts as units. The resulting embedding uncovers meaningful structure in the data.
title Wasserstein t-SNE
topic Machine Learning
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07531