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I wouldn't necessarily reach for PCA. No reason to think that the first two principal components necessarily encode anything particularly interesting. If you wa
by gwern 4y ago
I wouldn't necessarily reach for PCA. No reason to think that the first two principal components necessarily encode anything particularly interesting. If you want to lay out each point in 2D in a way which keeps similar points nearby, something like t-SNE is worth a try - visualizing embeddings is what it was invented for.
- genmon 4y agoExcellent, new to me and I'll give it a go, thanks! I gravitate to PCA for terrible reasons (undergrad so it's what I think of first) and like you say, it's beguiling yet disappointing, the components rarely have any human meaning.