New and Simplified Manual Controls for Projection and Slice Tours, With Application to Exploring Classification Boundaries in High Dimensions

This article describes new user controls for examining high-dimensional data using low-dimensional linear projections and slices. A user can interactively change the contribution of a given variable to a low-dimensional projection, which is useful for exploring the sensitivity of structure to particular variables. The user can also interactively shift the center of a slice, for example, to explore how structure changes in local subspaces. The Mathematica package as well as example notebooks are provided, which contain functions enabling the user to experiment with these new manual controls, with one specifically for exploring regions and boundaries produced by classification models. The advantage of Mathematica is its linear algebra capabilities and interactive cursor location controls. Some limited implementation has also been made available in the R package tourr. for this article are available online.

Automated summary

This article introduces new user controls for examining high-dimensional data using low-dimensional linear projections and slices. The user can interactively change the contribution of a given variable to a low-dimensional projection and shift the center of a slice to explore structure changes in local subspaces. Mathematica package and example notebooks are provided for users to experiment with these manual controls, with one specifically for exploring regions and boundaries produced by classification models. Limited implementation is also available in the R package tourr.