Learning a Parametric Embedding by Preserving Local Structure

The paper presents a new unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique, called parametric t-SNE, that learns a parametric mapping between the high-dimensional data space and the low-dimensional latent space. Parametric t-SNE learns the parametric mapping in such a way that the local structure of the data is preserved as well as possible in the latent space. We evaluate the performance of parametric t-SNE in experiments on three datasets, in which we compare it to the performance of two other unsupervised parametric dimensionality reduction techniques. The results of experiments illustrate the strong performance of parametric t-SNE, in particular, in learning settings in which the dimensionality of the latent space is relatively low.