ML 56: A t-SNE Picture Keeps the Neighbours and Loses the Map
Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. Two Gaussian clusters in ten dimensions, one ten times as wide as the other, came out of t-SNE with a radius ratio between 0.99 and 1.01 at perplexities 5, 30 and 100; three clusters with one gap ten times the other came out with a gap ratio between 0....