What is a UMAP? - Allen Institute
This is a special type of graph, called a Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP). UMAPs are helpful ways of displaying many types of data and are often referred to as one type of dimensionality reduction tool. Dimensionality reduction is a technique that helps represent many-dimensional data in just two or three dimensions. Think about the classic example of an x and y graph. In this graph, you have two variables, one on the x-axis and one on the y-axis. Because we only have two variables, our data is considered two-dimensional (2D). But what happens when we have data that includes thousands of variables, and as a result, thousands of dimensions? This is when we use a dimensionality reduction tool! At the Allen Institute, we use a dimensionality reduction tool called a UMAP to represent many-dimensional data in a 2D space. How are UMAPs used to represent transcriptomic data? Here at the Allen Institute, many of the UMAPs we share as a part of our open science mission repr
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