t-sne

Definition

t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding, from van der Maaten and Hinton: it models pairwise neighbor relations as probabilities and arranges points in 2-D so those relations are preserved, which makes local cluster structure pop out. It was the default embedding plot before UMAP. The standard caveats: distances between clusters and their relative sizes carry no meaning, output depends on the perplexity setting, and separate runs can look different.