lmcinnes / lmcinnes/umap

Possible to backprop through UMAP encoding/sensitivity analysis?

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Description

Hi,

If I constructed a pipeline consisting first of a UMAP embedding R^N->R^M followed by some differentiable mapping R^M->R1 (say, in the case of a simple binary classifier), is there a way to backprop 'through' the encoder such that one could perform something like integrated gradients for sensitivity analysis/feature attribution?

I'm very curious as to what people are doing for explainability when using UMAP. Of course it is always possible to do some sort of perturbation sensitivity analysis or kernelSHAP (etc), but this tends to not be super computationally efficient.

Thank you!

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Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Investigate how UMAP encoding is implemented and whether the requested backpropagation and integrated-gradients workflow fits the project; done would require a settled, documented approach or a clearly scoped implementation plan.

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Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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