fastumap

A UMAP and clustering library built for one thing: importing it costs milliseconds, not seconds — nothing compiles when you import it. Mostly NumPy and SciPy, with precompiled native kernels (Rust, built into the wheel) for speed at scale.

umap-learn's kernels are compiled by numba with LLVM the first time the package is imported — seconds on a laptop, minutes on a small CPU-throttled container. NumPy and SciPy are equally compiled, but they ship their machine code precompiled in the wheel, so they load immediately. fastumap reimplements the UMAP algorithm on top of them: the same mathematics, with nothing left to compile at import time.

Installation

pip install fastumap                 # one wheel — native kernels included
pip install fastumap[ann]            # adds an approximate kNN backend for large inputs (see below)

Usage

from fastumap import umap_project, spectral_project

xy  = umap_project(x, 2)                     # (n, 2)
xyz = umap_project(x, 3)                     # (n, 3)
red = umap_project(x, 10)                    # ~10-D for clustering (not just 2/3)
cos = umap_project(x, 2, metric="cosine")    # text / CLS embeddings
dm  = umap_project(x, 2, densmap=True)       # densMAP: keep dense/sparse regions distinct

• metric="cosine" is recommended for encoder embeddings; Euclidean distance on unnormalised vectors is dominated by magnitude rather than the direction that carries meaning.
• pca_dim=100 pre-reduces very wide inputs (e.g. 1024-dimensional embeddings) before the nearest-neighbour search. Neighbour overlap is preserved to within ~0.01. Off by default.

umap_project also accepts n_neighbors, min_dist, spread, n_epochs, negative_sample_rate, random_state, and chunk_count.

Supervised projection

Pass categorical labels as y to let the classes inform the layout — same-label points attract, so structure that is separable in the input space stays separable in 2-D instead of interleaving:

xy = umap_project(x, 2, y=labels)                     # labels: one int per point, -1 = unlabelled
xy = umap_project(x, 2, y=labels, target_weight=0.9)  # lean harder on the labels

target_weight ∈ [0, 1] (default 0.5) trades geometry against labels: 0.0 barely weakens inter-class edges, 1.0 cuts them entirely. -1 labels count as unlabelled (semi-supervised), and the default y=None is ordinary unsupervised UMAP, unchanged.

This ports umap-learn's categorical intersection. The UMAP paper only sketches the idea (arXiv:1802.03426, §7 Future Work), so umap-learn is the reference — see its supervised docs.

Clustering

cluster groups points directly — implemented ourselves (numpy and scipy plus the native k-means kernel), with no external clustering library. It does not compute a 2-D layout first: that layout is an iterative SGD and takes minutes at a million points, and clustering doesn't need it.

from fastumap import cluster

labels = cluster(embeddings, method="kmeans", n_clusters=20)     # k-means++ / Lloyd
labels = cluster(embeddings, method="spectral", n_clusters=20)   # non-convex clusters
labels = cluster(embeddings, method="dbscan")                    # density: finds k, noise = -1
labels = cluster(embeddings, method="hdbscan")                   # density, no eps to pick

hdbscan is the hierarchical version of dbscan: no eps at all, so clusters of different densities come out together (the root of the hierarchy is never a cluster, so a single-group dataset comes back all -1). kmeans and spectral take n_clusters and metric ("euclidean" / "cosine") and are deterministic given random_state. k-means is our own k-means++ seeding and Lloyd iterations with a blocked assignment step, so the n×k distance matrix is never materialised — it holds to the low-memory constraint at scale. spectral reuses fastumap's own normalised-eigenvector machinery, then k-means those. For a picture, call umap_project separately (usually on a sample) — clustering and visualisation are different jobs.

More knobs:

• return_centroids=True returns a ClusterResult(labels, centroids, inertia) instead of just labels — the numbers you need to compare runs or pick k.
• choose_k(x, k_min=2, k_max=10) picks n_clusters for you, by the inertia elbow. A heuristic: it lands on the true k give or take one when the clusters are clear.
• assign_clusters(x_new, centroids) labels new points against already-fitted centroids — the predict half, no re-clustering.

For large inputs fastumap's native k-means kernel — compiled into the wheel (matrixmultiply SIMD GEMM + rayon over row-blocks) — replaces the inner loop: it clusters 1,000,000 × 128 into 64 groups in ~10 s on a 16-core machine (measured on SIFT1M), versus minutes for the numpy path, and engages automatically above 50k points. That is a multi-core batch figure — on a throttled container (0.5–2 vCPU) the same job is CPU-bound and takes far longer, so run clustering on a real machine, not a fractional-vCPU serving box.

Quality relative to umap-learn

fastumap stays within 0.01 neighbour overlap of umap-learn. Measured on MNIST (784-dimensional, seed 42). These numbers are generated, not pasted: run make bench-report to regenerate them into a dated report under docs/bench/, which records the machine, the load average and every package version they were measured on.

Read the quality columns, not the wall times: overlap@15 and global corr are deterministic, while the times above came from a loaded machine (see the report) and are inflated for every method. PCA is the control — it keeps global structure best and local structure worst, which is the trade-off UMAP exists to fix.

umap-learn's times reuse the numba compilation from its first fit; a fresh process pays roughly 20 s of compilation on every invocation, which fastumap never pays. Above ~50k points fastumap's exact O(n²) neighbour search becomes the bottleneck — pip install fastumap[ann] addresses that (see below). Raising chunk_count (default 1) recovers most of the remaining local-overlap gap at proportional cost and stays deterministic.

overlap@15 is the fraction of each point's 15 input-space neighbours retained after projection (read against a random baseline). global corr is the Spearman correlation of all pairwise distances, before versus after.

Speed per call

Cold start is fastumap's win. Per-call latency is the trade-off.

• The native kernel ships by default, so per-call speed is close to umap-learn on large batches (it runs umap-learn's true in-place SGD, in Rust).
• The numpy fallback (only an unbuilt source checkout uses it) is the slow one: ~2× slower at 1024 dims, n=5000 (~40 s vs ~20 s). A vectorised numpy SGD can't match numba's compiled loop.

So: pick fastumap when import and cold-start cost dominate. On raw per-call latency for big, high-dimensional batches, it's roughly even with umap-learn on the kernel path.

BLAS thread cap under a CPU quota

Some containers cap CPU (docker --cpus, Kubernetes/EKS limits, EC2 cgroups) but still report the host's full core count. BLAS then starts too many threads for the quota and thrashes under load.

fastumap caps the BLAS pool to the quota automatically — no configuration. Measured under docker --cpus=0.5, 16-core host, 4 workers: per-call time drops ~70 s → ~43 s (≈1.6×). Where no quota is visible, nothing is capped.

AWS Fargate is a no-op here: it meters CPU outside the cgroup, so the quota is invisible. But Fargate also reports a low core count, so BLAS doesn't oversubscribe there anyway.

Server usage

umap_project is thread-safe — it holds no module-level mutable state and seeds a fresh RNG per call — so it may be called from a worker thread (await asyncio.to_thread(umap_project, x, 2)).

Don't recompute the whole layout on every request. Fit once, then place new points into it:

from fastumap import fit, transform
from fastumap.projection import UMAPModel

model = fit(window, 2)                                 # cache it
xy, fit_distance = transform(model, pts, return_distances=True)   # coords + per-point fit

model.to_npz("layout.npz")                             # persist across restarts (versioned)
model = UMAPModel.from_npz("layout.npz")

• transform places new points without a refit. It keeps ~72% of a full fit's local overlap, and the layout stays stable across requests.
• return_distances=True gives each point's distance to its nearest training neighbour — a fit score. A point 2–3× further out than the training mean is an extrapolation. A rising batch mean means: time to refit.
• to_npz / from_npz persists the model in a versioned numpy format. It survives releases; a raw pickle would break on any dataclass change.
• init=previous is the other option: umap_project(window, 2, init=previous) reuses the old coordinates so carried-over points start where they were (you place any new rows). Use it to refresh a view without the fit/transform split.

A cached 5000×1024 model is about 20 MB (training data stored as float32). Not supported: rolling windows and sparse input — densify sparse input first, and refit when the window slides.

The native accelerator

fastumap ships a compiled Rust extension (fastumap._accel) inside the wheel — a reimplementation of the SGD layout kernel and the k-means kernel. The prebuilt wheels (abi3, Python 3.11+; Linux x86_64 and aarch64/Graviton) carry it, so it is used automatically. On a platform without a prebuilt wheel, pip builds from the sdist, which needs a Rust toolchain. The NumPy path remains as a runtime fallback — if the extension is ever not present (for instance an unbuilt source checkout), fastumap still works, just slower. The SGD kernel is roughly 1.7–1.9× faster with slightly higher overlap.

Because it performs umap-learn's true in-place walk rather than the fallback's per-epoch approximation, it produces a different — higher-quality — layout for the same seed. Query the active path with:

import fastumap
fastumap.accelerator_active()   # True if the native kernel is present (the normal case)

Upgrading from fastumap-accel? It no longer exists as a separate package — its kernels are built into fastumap itself (0.2.1+). Just pip install -U fastumap and drop any fastumap-accel dependency; nothing else changes.

Large inputs (approximate kNN)

The exact neighbour search is O(n²) and dominates runtime above ~20k points. pip install fastumap[ann] adds an approximate backend — faiss HNSW, which ships prebuilt wheels (Linux x86_64/aarch64, macOS, Windows), so it installs without a compiler.

xy = umap_project(x, 2, knn="auto")   # default: exact for small n, approximate above 16k
xy = umap_project(x, 2, knn="approx") # force approximate (needs fastumap[ann])
xy = umap_project(x, 2, knn="exact")  # force the exact brute force

"auto" (the default) only switches to approximate when the extra is installed and n ≥ 16384, so small inputs stay bit-identical. It's deterministic and keeps ≥0.86 neighbour recall against exact. Measured on the neighbour search alone (256-dim):

fastumap.ann_available() reports whether the backend is installed.

For a given input and seed, output is bit-identical across processes and machines in the same environment. Two things change it across different environments:

• The native kernel vs the numpy fallback — the wheels carry the kernel and use it by default; an unbuilt checkout falls back to numpy and differs.
• fastumap[ann] — the approximate neighbour graph above 16k points.

Treat both as part of the environment. accelerator_active() and ann_available() report which paths a run used, so a stored projection can record how it was made.

Guarantees

Each is enforced by a test:

• Nothing compiles at import — no numba/llvmlite JIT. The base is NumPy, SciPy and the pure-Python threadpoolctl; the native kernels ship precompiled in the wheel, so they import in milliseconds too.
• Import under 200 ms, deterministic (bit-identical) output, and thread-safe.
• Bounded memory — the full n×n distance matrix is never materialised (blocked kNN); under 200 MB at 5000×1024.
• Any output dimension — 2-D/3-D for pictures, ~10-D for clustering; fully type-checked under pyright strict.

Development

make check        # lint, type-check, and tests
make tox          # the suite across Python 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13
make bench-report # regenerate the quality + speed tables into a dated docs/bench/ report
make fargate      # import and fit timing under one CPU cap (docker --cpus=0.5 --memory=2g)
make constrained  # fit AND cluster timing under 0.5, 1 and 2 vCPU, into a dated report

License and attribution

fastumap is an independent reimplementation of the UMAP algorithm (McInnes, Healy & Melville, arXiv:1802.03426). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the UMAP authors and is not a drop-in replacement; the public API is intentionally small. MIT licensed.