t-SNE

t-SNE & UMAP ... They're just art—Lior Pachter An exploration of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) as generative mechanism. t-SNE is a widely used nonlinear dimension reduction technique. Here, however, it is used entirely for artistic purposes. The input data consists of arbitrarily generated groups of points. The groups retain their identity after t-SNE has been run, and group identity is used to color individual points in the final piece. Thus, the extent to which t-SNE retains or destroys the original group identity shapes the visual appearance of each individual piece. The entire series was generated by a single R program, using 99 consecutive random seeds. The respe...View all