How to Evaluate Dimensionality Reduction? - Improving the Co-ranking Matrix

The growing number of dimensionality reduction (DR) methods available for data visualization has recently inspired the development of quality assessment measures, in order to evaluate the resulting low-dimensional representation independently from a methods’ inherent criteria. Several (existing) quality measures can be (re)formulated based on the so-called co-ranking matrix, which subsumes all rank errors (i.e., differences between the ranking of distances from every point to all others, comparing the low-dimensional representation to the original data). The measures are often based on the partioning of the co-ranking matrix into 4 submatrices, divided at the K-th row and K-th column, calculating a weighted combination of the sums of each submatrix. Hence, the evaluation process typically involves plotting a graph over several (or even all possible) settings of the parameter K. Considering simple artificial examples, we argue that this parameter controls two notions at once, that need not necessarily be combined, and that the rectangular shape of submatrices is disadvantageous for an intuitive interpretation of the parameter. We debate that quality measures, as general and flexible evaluation tools, should have parameters with a direct and intuitive interpretation as to which specific error types are tolerated or penalized. Therefore, we propose to replace the parameter K with two distinct parameters to control these notions separately, and introduce a differently shaped weighting scheme on the co-ranking matrix. The two new parameters can then directly be interpreted, respectively, as a threshold up to which rank errors are tolerated, and a threshold up to which the rank-distances are significant for the quality evaluation. Moreover, we propose a color representation of local quality to visually support the evaluation process for a given mapping, where every point in the mapping is colored according to its local contribution to the overall quality value.