Fast and reliable incremental dimensionality reduction for streaming data

Abstract Streaming data applications are becoming more common due to the ability of different information sources to continuously capture or produce data, such as sensors and social media. Although there are recent advances, most visualization approaches, particularly Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques, cannot be directly applied in such scenarios due to the transient nature of streaming data. A few DR methods currently address this limitation using online or incremental strategies, continuously updating the visualization as data is received. Despite their relative success, most impose the need to store and access the data multiple times to produce a complete projection, not being appropriate for streaming where data continuously grow. Others do not impose such requirements but cannot update the position of the data already projected, potentially resulting in visual artifacts. This paper presents Xtreaming, a novel incremental DR technique that continuously updates the visual representation to reflect new emerging structures or patterns without visiting the high-dimensional data more than once. Our tests show that in streaming scenarios where data is not fully stored in-memory, Xtreaming is competitive in terms of quality compared to other streaming and incremental techniques while being orders of magnitude faster.