Intro
UMAP is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method that turns high-dimensional embeddings into low-dimensional representations (usually 2D or 3D) while preserving neighborhood structure.
Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) is a dimension reduction technique that can be used for visualisation similarly to t-SNE, but also for general non-linear dimension reduction. The algorithm is founded on three assumptions about the data
The data is uniformly distributed on Riemannian manifold;
The Riemannian metric is locally constant (or can be approximated as such);
The manifold is locally connected.
From these assumptions it is possible to model the manifold with a fuzzy topological structure. The embedding is found by searching for a low dimensional projection of the data that has the closest possible equivalent fuzzy topological structure.