Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

clircle

>1. Hyperparameters really matter

>2. Cluster sizes in a UMAP plot mean nothing

>3. Distances between clusters might not mean anything

>4. Random noise doesn’t always look random.

>5. You may need more than one plot

Oh OK, so this is basically impossible to know if you are learning something or inventing garbage.

View on HN

The big takeaway is that despite these UMAP is still useful.

I've used UMAP in the past. It's not quite as bad as you're suggesting. Points 2,3 and 4, are going to be things that you're going to want to verify quantitatively anyways. Despite this, it's still a fine way to throw points up and start exploring - just don't use it as the end all, be all.

And ironically these exact problems are why people stopped using t-SNE in favor of UMAP originally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com