1,343 research outputs found
The Topology ToolKit
This system paper presents the Topology ToolKit (TTK), a software platform
designed for topological data analysis in scientific visualization. TTK
provides a unified, generic, efficient, and robust implementation of key
algorithms for the topological analysis of scalar data, including: critical
points, integral lines, persistence diagrams, persistence curves, merge trees,
contour trees, Morse-Smale complexes, fiber surfaces, continuous scatterplots,
Jacobi sets, Reeb spaces, and more. TTK is easily accessible to end users due
to a tight integration with ParaView. It is also easily accessible to
developers through a variety of bindings (Python, VTK/C++) for fast prototyping
or through direct, dependence-free, C++, to ease integration into pre-existing
complex systems. While developing TTK, we faced several algorithmic and
software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. In
particular, we present an algorithm for the construction of a discrete gradient
that complies to the critical points extracted in the piecewise-linear setting.
This algorithm guarantees a combinatorial consistency across the topological
abstractions supported by TTK, and importantly, a unified implementation of
topological data simplification for multi-scale exploration and analysis. We
also present a cached triangulation data structure, that supports time
efficient and generic traversals, which self-adjusts its memory usage on demand
for input simplicial meshes and which implicitly emulates a triangulation for
regular grids with no memory overhead. Finally, we describe an original
software architecture, which guarantees memory efficient and direct accesses to
TTK features, while still allowing for researchers powerful and easy bindings
and extensions. TTK is open source (BSD license) and its code, online
documentation and video tutorials are available on TTK's website
Visualizing and Understanding Sum-Product Networks
Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) are recently introduced deep tractable
probabilistic models by which several kinds of inference queries can be
answered exactly and in a tractable time. Up to now, they have been largely
used as black box density estimators, assessed only by comparing their
likelihood scores only. In this paper we explore and exploit the inner
representations learned by SPNs. We do this with a threefold aim: first we want
to get a better understanding of the inner workings of SPNs; secondly, we seek
additional ways to evaluate one SPN model and compare it against other
probabilistic models, providing diagnostic tools to practitioners; lastly, we
want to empirically evaluate how good and meaningful the extracted
representations are, as in a classic Representation Learning framework. In
order to do so we revise their interpretation as deep neural networks and we
propose to exploit several visualization techniques on their node activations
and network outputs under different types of inference queries. To investigate
these models as feature extractors, we plug some SPNs, learned in a greedy
unsupervised fashion on image datasets, in supervised classification learning
tasks. We extract several embedding types from node activations by filtering
nodes by their type, by their associated feature abstraction level and by their
scope. In a thorough empirical comparison we prove them to be competitive
against those generated from popular feature extractors as Restricted Boltzmann
Machines. Finally, we investigate embeddings generated from random
probabilistic marginal queries as means to compare other tractable
probabilistic models on a common ground, extending our experiments to Mixtures
of Trees.Comment: Machine Learning Journal paper (First Online), 24 page
Doctor of Philosophy
dissertationWith the ever-increasing amount of available computing resources and sensing devices, a wide variety of high-dimensional datasets are being produced in numerous fields. The complexity and increasing popularity of these data have led to new challenges and opportunities in visualization. Since most display devices are limited to communication through two-dimensional (2D) images, many visualization methods rely on 2D projections to express high-dimensional information. Such a reduction of dimension leads to an explosion in the number of 2D representations required to visualize high-dimensional spaces, each giving a glimpse of the high-dimensional information. As a result, one of the most important challenges in visualizing high-dimensional datasets is the automatic filtration and summarization of the large exploration space consisting of all 2D projections. In this dissertation, a new type of algorithm is introduced to reduce the exploration space that identifies a small set of projections that capture the intrinsic structure of high-dimensional data. In addition, a general framework for summarizing the structure of quality measures in the space of all linear 2D projections is presented. However, identifying the representative or informative projections is only part of the challenge. Due to the high-dimensional nature of these datasets, obtaining insights and arriving at conclusions based solely on 2D representations are limited and prone to error. How to interpret the inaccuracies and resolve the ambiguity in the 2D projections is the other half of the puzzle. This dissertation introduces projection distortion error measures and interactive manipulation schemes that allow the understanding of high-dimensional structures via data manipulation in 2D projections
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