This document presents an approach called Approximate and User Steerable t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (A-tSNE) for progressive visual analytics of large and streaming datasets. A-tSNE speeds up t-SNE by approximating similarity computations during layout using k-nearest neighbors. It allows interactive steering and refinement of the layout. The approach is evaluated on two case studies, speeding up t-SNE over 100x on gene expression data and enabling interactive layout of streaming activity sensor data.
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