Youngjoo Kim

Jeewon Heo, Youngjoo Kim, Jos B. T. M. Roerdink

Sharpened dimensionality reduction (SDR), which belongs to the class of multidimensional projection techniques, has recently been introduced to tackle the challenges in the exploratory and visual analysis of high-dimensional data. SDR has been applied to various real-world datasets, such as human activity sensory data and astronomical datasets. However, manually labeling the samples from the generated projection are expensive. To address this problem, we propose here to use clustering methods such as k-means, Hierarchical Clustering, Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), and Spectral Clustering to easily label the 2D projections of high-dimensional data. We test our pipeline of SDR and the clustering methods on a range of synthetic and real-world datasets, including two different public human activity datasets extracted from smartphone accelerometer or gyroscope recordings of various movements. We apply clustering to assess the visual cluster separation of SDR, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We conclude that clustering SDR results yields better labeling results than clustering plain DR, and that k-means is the recommended clustering method for SDR in terms of clustering accuracy, ease-of-use, and computational scalability.

Youngjoo Kim, Alexandru C. Telea, Scott C. Trager et al.

Applying dimensionality reduction (DR) to large, high-dimensional data sets can be challenging when distinguishing the underlying high-dimensional data clusters in a 2D projection for exploratory analysis. We address this problem by first sharpening the clusters in the original high-dimensional data prior to the DR step using Local Gradient Clustering (LGC). We then project the sharpened data from the high-dimensional space to 2D by a user-selected DR method. The sharpening step aids this method to preserve cluster separation in the resulting 2D projection. With our method, end-users can label each distinct cluster to further analyze an otherwise unlabeled data set. Our `High-Dimensional Sharpened DR' (HD-SDR) method, tested on both synthetic and real-world data sets, is favorable to DR methods with poor cluster separation and yields a better visual cluster separation than these DR methods with no sharpening. Our method achieves good quality (measured by quality metrics) and scales computationally well with large high-dimensional data. To illustrate its concrete applications, we further apply HD-SDR on a recent astronomical catalog.