dtour: a steerable tour de vis through high-dimensional data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lekschas, Fritz, Abdennur, Nezar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lekschas, Fritz
Abdennur, Nezar
author_facet Lekschas, Fritz
Abdennur, Nezar
contents Understanding high-dimensional data requires projecting it into lower-dimensional spaces, but any single projection inevitably loses information or introduces distortions. Tours address this limitation through animation of 2D projection sequences, yet existing tools present tradeoffs in the freedom and steerability of projection traversal, providing little to no ability to move between expert-guided paths and unrestrained exploration. We present dtour, a tour interface that combines static projection previews, reversible scrubbing along continuous geodesic projection paths, manual projection manipulation, and a wandering grand tour, all within a single progressive exploration interface. dtour scales to millions of points via GPU-accelerated rendering, runs in any modern browser, and integrates with both Python and JavaScript ecosystems. We demonstrate dtour on text, image, and single-cell data for two usage scenarios: gradually revealing structure in high-dimensional data and validating non-linear dimensionality reduction outputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_04306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle dtour: a steerable tour de vis through high-dimensional data
Lekschas, Fritz
Abdennur, Nezar
Human-Computer Interaction
Understanding high-dimensional data requires projecting it into lower-dimensional spaces, but any single projection inevitably loses information or introduces distortions. Tours address this limitation through animation of 2D projection sequences, yet existing tools present tradeoffs in the freedom and steerability of projection traversal, providing little to no ability to move between expert-guided paths and unrestrained exploration. We present dtour, a tour interface that combines static projection previews, reversible scrubbing along continuous geodesic projection paths, manual projection manipulation, and a wandering grand tour, all within a single progressive exploration interface. dtour scales to millions of points via GPU-accelerated rendering, runs in any modern browser, and integrates with both Python and JavaScript ecosystems. We demonstrate dtour on text, image, and single-cell data for two usage scenarios: gradually revealing structure in high-dimensional data and validating non-linear dimensionality reduction outputs.
title dtour: a steerable tour de vis through high-dimensional data
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04306