What is the difference between t-SNE and PCA for dimensionality reduction and visualization?

Data Science with Python Hard

Data Science with Python — Hard

What is the difference between t-SNE and PCA for dimensionality reduction and visualization?

Key points

  • PCA is linear and deterministic, maximizing global variance
  • t-SNE is nonlinear and probabilistic, preserving local neighborhood structure
  • t-SNE is great for cluster visualization, but not for preprocessing
  • PCA is suitable for preprocessing and feature extraction
  • Both techniques have different strengths and weaknesses

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