Dynamic visualization of high-dimensional data

Abstract

Dimensionality reduction (DR) is commonly used to project highdimensional data into lower dimensions for visualization, which could then generate new insights and hypotheses. However, DR algorithms necessarily introduce distortions in the visualization and cannot faithfully represent all relations in the data. As such, there is a need for methods to assess the reliability of DR visualizations. Here we present DynamicViz, a framework for generating dynamic visualizations that capture the sensitivity of DR visualizations to perturbations in the data. DynamicVic can be applied to all commonly used DR methods. We show the utility of dynamic visualizations in diagnosing common interpretative pitfalls of static visualizations and extending existing single-cell analyses. We introduce the variance score to quantify the dynamic variability of observations in these visualizations. The variance score characterizes natural variability in the data and can be used to optimize DR algorithm implementations. We have made DynamicViz freely available to assist with the evaluation of DR visualizations.