When should one use data clustering and visualization techniques such as tSNE or UMAP?

Data clustering and visualization techniques like t-SNE (t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) and UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) are used to reduce the dimensionality of high-dimensional datasets and visualize clusters in a lower-dimensional space, typically 2D or 30 for interpretation. As covered in NVIDIA’s Generative AI and LLMs course, these techniques are particularly valuable in exploratory data analysis (EDA) for identifying patterns, groupings, or structure in data, such as clustering similar text embeddings in NLP tasks. They help reveal underlying relationships in complex datasets without requiring labeled data. Option A is incorrect, as t-SNE and UMAP are not designed for handling missing values, which is addressed by imputation techniques. Option B is wrong, as these methods are not used for regression analysis but for unsupervised visualization. Option D is inaccurate, as feature extraction is typically handled by methods like PCA or autoencoders, not t-SNE or UMAP, which focus on visualization. The course notes: “Techniques like t-SNE and UMAP are used to reduce data dimensionality and visualize clusters in lower-dimensional spaces, aiding in the understanding of data structure in NLP and other tasks.”