UMAP's 'preserves global structure' claim over t-SNE falsified — initialization is what matters
burny_tech · x · 2026-11-01
A Matters Arising article by Kobak & Linderman in Nature Biotechnology refutes the claim that UMAP preserves global data structure better than t-SNE. The figure shows both t-SNE (PCA init) and UMAP (LE init) preserve global structure, while random initialization breaks it for both — the initialization scheme, not the algorithm, is decisive.
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