CO-SNE: Dimensionality Reduction and Visualization for Hyperbolic Data

Hyperbolic space can naturally embed hierarchies that often exist in real-world data and semantics. While high-dimensional hyperbolic embeddings lead to better representations, most hyperbolic models utilize low-dimensional embeddings, due to non-trivial optimization and visualization of high-dimensional hyperbolic data. We propose CO-SNE, which extends the Euclidean space visualization tool, t-SNE, to hyperbolic space. Like t-SNE, it converts distances between data points to joint probabilities and tries to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the joint probabilities of high-dimensional data X and low-dimensional embedding Y. However, unlike Euclidean space, hyperbolic space is inhomogeneous: A volume could contain a lot more points at a location far from the origin. CO-SNE thus uses hyperbolic normal distributions for X and hyperbolic Cauchy instead of t-SNE's Student's t-distribution for Y, and it additionally seeks to preserve X's individual distances to the Origin in Y. We apply CO-SNE to naturally hyperbolic data and supervisedly learned hyperbolic features. Our results demonstrate that CO-SNE deflates high-dimensional hyperbolic data into a low-dimensional space without losing their hyperbolic characteristics, significantly outperforming popular visualization tools such as PCA, t-SNE, UMAP, and HoroPCA which is also designed for hyperbolic data.