2021/08/18 by Zhirong Yang, Yang, Zhirong, Yuwei Chen +7
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Clustering Algorithms Research #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Data Visualization and Analytics #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2108.08003
openalex publication_date 2021/08/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Neighbor Embedding (NE) aims to preserve pairwise similarities between data items and has been shown to yield an effective principle for data visualization. However, even the best existing NE methods such as Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (SNE) may leave large-scale patterns hidden, for example clusters, despite strong signals being present in the data. To address this, we propose a new cluster visualization method based on the Neighbor Embedding principle. We first present a family of Neighbor Embedding methods that generalizes SNE by using non-normalized Kullback-Leibler divergence with a scale parameter. In this family, much better cluster visualizations often appear with a parameter value different from the one corresponding to SNE. We also develop an efficient software that employs asynchronous stochastic block coordinate descent to optimize the new family of objective functions. Our experimental results demonstrate that the method consistently and substantially improves the visualization of data clusters compared with the state-of-the-art NE approaches.