tensorflow-projection-qm 0.1.0

A package with fast, TensorFlow-based implementations of projection (i.e., dimensionality reduction) quality metrics.

Accelerated Projection Quality Metrics

When evaluating Dimensionality Reduction (AKA Projection) techniques, a number of quality metrics are usually employed.

These quality metrics are numeric ways of evaluating a projection, and might be useful to determine whether a sane projection has been produced by an algorithm (e.g, t-SNE, or UMAP).

In this repository, I aim to provide a comprehensive set of implementations of projection quality metrics that are fast and use idiomatic TensorFlow in their implementation.

Quality Metrics

A quality metric is a function $\mathcal{M}_\eta$ with two arguments: a dataset $\mathbf{X} \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times D}$ of $D$-dimensional data points, and a corresponding projection $\mathbf{Y} = \mathcal{P}(\mathbb{X}) \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$ where $d$ is usually 2 or 3.

Projection algorithms can generate $\mathbf{Y}$ in many ways. Of course, not all such projections are equally useful and/or truthful to the data they are based on. While some techniques might be better at representing global aspects of the original dataset $\mathbf{X}$, others might instead favor local neighborhood preservation.

Each $\mathcal{M}_\eta(\mathbf{X}, \mathbf{Y})$ returns a single score representing the quality of $\mathbf{Y}$ as a projection for $\mathbb{X}$. Different quality metrics aim to evaluate different aspects of data pattern preservation. For example, Trustworthiness is a metric that aims to evaluate the amount of false neighbors introduced in a projection -- that is to say, points that were not close in $D$-dimensional space and have been wrongfully brought together by $\mathcal{P}$. Stress is another metric, aimed at measuring discrepancies in pairwise distances in $\mathbf{X}$ when compared to pairwise distances in $\mathbf{Y}$.

Installation

Installation is possible using pip directly:

pip install tensorflow-projection-qm

Using

The functions that calculate the quality metrics all sit in the tensorflow_projection_qm.metrics package.

from tensorflow_projection_qm.metrics import continuity, trustworthiness

# Set up some fake data
import numpy as np
X = np.random.randn(100, 5)  # 100 data points with 5 dimensions.

# Project to 2-D with TSNE
from sklearn.manifold import TSNE
X_proj = TSNE(n_components=2).fit_transform(X).astype(X.dtype)

# Evaluate the projection:
C = continuity(X, X_proj, k=21).numpy()
T = trustworthiness(X, X_proj, k=21).numpy()
print(f"Continuity: {C}")
print(f"Trustworthiness: {T}")

Why this package?

I have a recurring need in my research (see About Me below) to evaluate different projection algorithms with respect to different quality metrics. While there are some libraries for this, and I am grateful for their authors' work in gathering and implementing different quality metrics (see, for example, ZADU), I have found some implementations to not be as performant as I need them to be (keep in mind I evaluate thousands of projections at a time), and sometimes buggy.

At some point I noticed I had been re-implementing the same quality metrics over and over again, sometimes introducing bugs myself due to mistakes when copying and adapting code from a public source, such as Espadoto's comprehensive survey.

Instead, I have chosen to start this package with the goals of:

1. Having easy access to standard implementations of projection quality metrics;
2. Implementing quality metrics in vectorized manners as often as possible, taking advantage of parallel execution for speeding up calculations;
3. Sharing this code openly as my first package to be published on PyPi.org;
4. Using an easily-available framework (TensorFlow) to back up my implementations and seamlessly take advantage of GPUs when available.

About

This package is under active development, and is very much in its early stages. Please feel free to report bugs, but also be mindful that this is a best-effort attempt to generalize/speed up my own implementations of quality metrics.

About Me

My name is Alister Machado, I am a PhD Candidate researching Data Visualization (more specifically focused in dimensionality reduction and explainable AI). I am the person behind ShaRP and the Differentiable DBMs. You can check out my research here. I am currently in the 4th year of my PhD (out of 5 total), and am expected to graduate in 2026. Feel free to reach out!