Explaining t-SNE Embeddings Locally by Adapting LIME

Abstract

Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques, such as t-SNE, are widely used to visualize and analyze high-dimensional datasets. While non-linear projections can be of high quality, it is hard, or even impossible, to interpret the dimensions of the obtained embeddings. This paper adapts LIME to locally explain t-SNE embeddings. More precisely, the sampling and black-box-querying steps of LIME are modified so that they can be used to explain t-SNE locally. The result of the proposal is to provide, for a particular instance x and a particular t-SNE embedding Y, an interpretable model that locally explains the projection of x on Y.

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ESANN
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