Some Theoretical Limitations of t-SNE

Rupert Li; Elchanan Mossel

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arXiv · 2604.13295

Some Theoretical Limitations of t-SNE

Rupert Li·Elchanan Mossel

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Abstract

t-SNE has gained popularity as a dimension reduction technique, especially for visualizing data. It is well-known that all dimension reduction techniques may lose important features of the data. We provide a mathematical framework for understanding this loss for t-SNE by establishing a number of results in different scenarios showing how important features of data are lost by using t-SNE.

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Rupert Li, Elchanan Mossel. 2026-04-14. Some Theoretical Limitations of t-SNE. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13295

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