What is t-SNE?

t-SNE

t-SNE (Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) is a dimension reduction technique for data visualization. t-SNE was built to solve several issues with SNE, namely that its cost function is very difficult to optimize and that it has a crowding problem. Two main modifications are introduced by t-SNE to solve these issues: symmetrization and the use of t-distributions for the low-dimensional probabilities, respectively. These modifications arguably made t-SNE the state-of-the-art for dimension reduction for visualization for many years until UMAP came along.