pymde 0.2.3
Minimum-Distortion Embedding
License: Apache License, Version 2.0

# PyMDE
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*The official documentation for PyMDE is available at www.pymde.org.*

This repository accompanies the monograph [*Minimum-Distortion Embedding*](https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/papers/min_dist_emb.html).

PyMDE is a Python library for computing vector embeddings for finite sets of
items, such as images, biological cells, nodes in a network, or any other
abstract object.

What sets PyMDE apart from other embedding libraries is that it provides a
simple but general framework for embedding, called _Minimum-Distortion
Embedding_ (MDE). With MDE, it is easy to recreate well-known embeddings and to
create new ones, tailored to your particular application.

PyMDE is competitive
in runtime with more specialized embedding methods. With a GPU, it can be
even faster.

## Overview
PyMDE can be enjoyed by beginners and experts alike. It can be used to:

* visualize datasets, small or large;
* generate feature vectors for supervised learning;
* compress high-dimensional vector data;
* draw graphs (in up to orders of magnitude less time than packages like NetworkX);
* create custom embeddings, with custom objective functions and constraints (such as having uncorrelated feature columns);
* and more.

PyMDE is very young software, under active development. If you run into issues,
or have any feedback, please reach out by [filing a Github
issue](https://github.com/cvxgrp/pymde/issues).

This README gives a very brief overview of PyMDE. Make sure to read the 
official documentation at www.pymde.org, which has in-depth tutorials
and API documentation.

- [Installation](#installation)
- [Getting started](#getting-started)
- [Example notebooks](#example-notebooks)
- [Citing](#citing)

## Installation
PyMDE is available on the Python Package Index, and on Conda Forge.

To install with pip, use

```
pip install pymde
```

Alternatively, to install with conda, use

```
conda install -c pytorch -c conda-forge pymde
```

PyMDE has the following requirements:

* Python >= 3.7
* numpy >= 1.17.5
* scipy
* torch >= 1.7.1
* torchvision >= 0.8.2
* pynndescent
* requests

## Getting started
Getting started with PyMDE is easy. For embeddings that work out-of-the box, we provide two main functions:

```python3
pymde.preserve_neighbors
```

which preserves the local structure of original data, and 

```python3
pymde.preserve_distances
```

which preserves pairwise distances or dissimilarity scores in the original
data.

**Arguments.** The input to these functions is the original data, represented
either as a data matrix in which each row is a feature vector, or as a
(possibly sparse) graph encoding pairwise distances. The embedding dimension is
specified by the `embedding_dim` keyword argument, which is `2` by default.

**Return value.** The return value is an `MDE` object. Calling the `embed()`
method on this object returns an embedding, which is a matrix
(`torch.Tensor`) in which each row is an embedding vector. For example, if the
original input is a data matrix of shape `(n_items, n_features)`, then the
embedding matrix has shape `(n_items, embeddimg_dim)`.

We give examples of using these functions below. 

### Preserving neighbors
The following code produces an embedding of the MNIST dataset (images of
handwritten digits), in a fashion similar to LargeVis, t-SNE, UMAP, and other
neighborhood-based embeddings. The original data is a matrix of shape `(70000,
784)`, with each row representing an image.

```python3
import pymde

mnist = pymde.datasets.MNIST()
embedding = pymde.preserve_neighbors(mnist.data, verbose=True).embed()
pymde.plot(embedding, color_by=mnist.attributes['digits'])
```

![](https://github.com/cvxgrp/pymde/blob/main/images/mnist.png?raw=true)

Unlike most other embedding methods, PyMDE can compute embeddings that satisfy
constraints. For example:

```python3
embedding = pymde.preserve_neighbors(mnist.data, constraint=pymde.Standardized(), verbose=True).embed()
pymde.plot(embedding, color_by=mnist.attributes['digits'])
```

![](https://github.com/cvxgrp/pymde/blob/main/images/mnist_std.png?raw=true)

The standardization constraint enforces the embedding vectors to be centered
and have uncorrelated features.


### Preserving distances
The function `pymde.preserve_distances` is useful when you're more interested
in preserving the gross global structure instead of local structure. 

Here's an example that produces an embedding of an academic coauthorship
network, from Google Scholar. The original data is a sparse graph on roughly
40,000 authors, with an edge between authors who have collaborated on at least
one paper.

```python3
import pymde

google_scholar = pymde.datasets.google_scholar()
embedding = pymde.preserve_distances(google_scholar.data, verbose=True).embed()
pymde.plot(embedding, color_by=google_scholar.attributes['coauthors'], color_map='viridis', background_color='black')
```

![](https://github.com/cvxgrp/pymde/blob/main/images/scholar.jpg?raw=true)

More collaborative authors are colored brighter, and are near the center of the
embedding.


## Example notebooks
We have several [example notebooks](https://github.com/cvxgrp/pymde/tree/main/examples) that show how to use PyMDE on real (and synthetic) datasets.

## Citing
To cite our work, please use the following BibTex entry.

```
@article{agrawal2021minimum,
  author  = {Agrawal, Akshay and Ali, Alnur and Boyd, Stephen},
  title   = {Minimum-Distortion Embedding},
  journal = {arXiv},
  year    = {2021},
}
```

PyMDE was designed and developed by [Akshay Agrawal](https://www.akshayagrawal.com/).