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Leland McInnes

@lelandmcinnes.bsky.social
2.8K followers 300 following 54 posts

A Mathematician dabbling in Data Science, especially unsupervised learning and data exploration. UMAP, HDBSCAN, PyNNDescent, DataMapPlot. (He/Him)

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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I am going to be in Boston for the IEEE VIS conference Nov 9 -13 this year! I am keen to talk dimension reduction, clustering, and data maps (UMAP, HDBSCAN, DataMapPlot). If you are going to be at VIS, or are just in Boston, and want to grab a coffee, please reach out. DMs open.
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Posit @posit.co · 08/09/2026
Leland McInnes built UMAP to help humans (not AI) make sense of messy piles of images, documents, and video. His full thinking on data, taste, and exploration is on The Test Set. Listen now: posit.co/thetestset/episode/smuggle…
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David Gasquez @davidgasquez.com · 17/06/2026
Agents are everywhere now but is worth remembering that there are still so many cool things we can do with good ol matrix factorization and embeddings. No LLMs required.
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grant @grantcuster.com · 25/06/2026
Wikimedia concepts embedded and then mapped to a sphere with UMAP. Trying out topic clusters as continents. Not really sure where it's going.
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CreativeApplications.Net @creativeapps.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
New in the Archives Browser (Members): Semantic Space — CAN archives as a 3D cloud. Every post embedded, mapped with UMAP, clustered with k-means. Hover for titles, click to trace relatives + search. #threejs → www.creativeapplications.net/archives-bro...
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TMLR Published Papers @tmlr-pub.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
The Shape of Attraction in UMAP: Exploring the Embedding Forces in Dimensionality Reduction Mohammad Tariqul Islam, Jason W. Fleischer Action editor: Dmitry Kobak openreview.net/forum?id=fdPNhqav5G #embedding #cluster #dimensionality
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Kevin A. Scott, PhD @sculpturatus.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Want to compare your molecules to FDA-approved drugs or the Enamine 10k library? I made an open-source tool that visualizes physicochemical properties and metrics like Böttcher complexity as 2D/3D PCA or UMAP plots. Fast and easy. Mac only. github.com/sculpturatus...
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
You missed import evoc ;-)
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Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D. @brianckeegan.com · 23/05/2026
things are getting hot and heavy here tonight
import umap
import hdbscan
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
from sklearn.metrics import adjusted_rand_score, normalized_mutual_info_score
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Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Need to run your latent space exploration inside a Jupyter Notebook instead? No worries! We have got you covered there as well! (5/n)
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Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
🔭 Paper Day! 🧪 Introducing Hyrax — an astro-focused ML framework built for the era of Rubin, Roman, and Euclid Handles the entire ML lifecycle: from data acquisition → training → inference → interactive latent-space discovery. pip install hyrax (1/n) 🧵 #astronomy #astrocoding #extragalactic
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Pablo Marcos-Manchón @jazzmaniatico.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Can neural representations from different people be translated into a shared space without paired data? In our preprint, "Platonic Representations in the Human Brain: Unsupervised Recovery of Universal Geometry", with Rishi Jha and @fuentemilla.bsky.social, we test this using fMRI 🧵👇
Marcos-Manchón, P., Jha, R., & Fuentemilla, L. (2026). Platonic Representations in the Human Brain: Unsupervised Recovery of Universal Geometry. arXiv [q-Bio.NC]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20496
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Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Showcase #2: 🔭 Cluster-Scale Lens hunting with Hyrax in collab with @khullar.bsky.social UMAP + DBSCAN found a galaxy cluster overdensity in @vrubinobs.bsky.social DP1 → human-in-the-loop spotted a lensed arc behind it → Euclid VIS confirmed presence Gemini follow-up incoming 👀 (9/n)
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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 19/05/2026
New post: Tagging my blog with BERTopic and LLMs. I suspect as token costs increase, we'll see more blended traditional ML/LLM systems. And, in general, they work really well! vickiboykis.com/2026/05/18/t...
vickiboykis.com
Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs
LLMs mean you still need a human in the loop, but in a different part
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Nezar Abdennur @nvictus.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Explore yourself at: dtour.dev
dtour.dev
dtour: interactive visual tours of high-dimensional data
Visually explore high-dimensional data and embeddings through interactive, smoothly-animated tours of 2D projections to build intuition for the full data manifold.
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Nezar Abdennur @nvictus.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
High-dimensional data is hard to understand. But is it truly cursed? To help you build better intuition for high-dimensional datasets, @lekschas.de and I developed dtour, a visualization tool for smoothly navigating through data projections.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Seth Levine gave a great talk on the art of clustering at ODSC East that really digs in the practical realities of getting the most out of your data. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtZ3...
youtube.com
The Art of Clustering: The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful by Seth Levine, Contentsquare
YouTube video by Open Data Science and AI Conference
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Vincent D. Warmerdam @koaning.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
People should not sleep on the new EVoC clustering algorithm. It's got me rethinking a lot of my widgets and bulk labelling tricks. youtu.be/1roN51JXuX8
youtube.com
marimo
The Most Satisfying Method to Explore Embeddings
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Ada Homolova @adahomolova.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
What’s the world searching for right now? Explore the past 24 hours in combined google trends and local news sources from 125 countries. Similar topics cluster together. Focus on the clusters or the outliers. 🐸 👉 trends.datafrosch.fun #dataviz #dataexploration worldnews #UMAP #localmodels
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
EVoC is available now on github and PyPI. Documentation: evoc.readthedocs.io Github: github.com/TutteInstitu... PyPI: pip install evoc
evoc.readthedocs.io
EVōC: Embedding Vector Oriented Clustering — EVoC 0.1.0 documentation
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
EVoC uses the Sklearn API, so you can drop it into existing pipelines. It requires less parameter tuning than most other similar clustering algorithms.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Do you use KMeans for your embedding clustering for the sake of speed? Good news, EVoC performance scales very well, and EVoC can be competitive with MiniBatchKMeans, while producing better clusters for high dimensional embedding vectors.
Line splot showing scaling of different algorithms with dataset size. EVoC scales equivalently to MinibatchKMeans and much better than other algorithms.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Do you use UMAP + HDBSCAN for your embedding vector clustering pipeline? Good news, EVoC works similarly (but better! and much much faster!), and is developed by the original authors of the umap-learn and hdbscan python packages.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
EVoC is a library designed specifically for fast clustering of high dimensional embedding vectors. It can produce high quality clusters extremely efficiently, and requires little to no hyperparameter tuning. Better clustering than UMAP + HDBSCAN; faster clustering than KMeans.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
PLSCAN docs: fast-hdbscan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pl... metrics and constraints: fast-hdbscan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/me... PLSCAN paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.16558
fast-hdbscan.readthedocs.io
Multi-Resolution Clustering with PLSCAN — fast_hdbscan 0.1 documentation
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
There's a new release of fast-hdbscan out now on PyPI that adds some major new features. - A PLSCAN implementation based on work by Jelmer Bot - Support for diverse metrics via PyNNDescent - A powerful "cannot-link" constraint system for semi-supervised clustering by Richard Hakim
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
huggingface.co/spaces/davan...
huggingface.co
Nemotron V3 Atlas - a Hugging Face Space by davanstrien
This app lets you upload your vector embeddings (e.g., CSV or JSON files) and instantly creates an interactive 2‑D/3‑D plot where similar items cluster together. You can explore the layout, hover o...
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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
One of the nicest things about Nvidia model releases is that they ship the training data. What does it look like? I sampled 250k examples from 24 datasets in the Nemotron post-training v3 collection and built an interactive Embedding Atlas to explore it.
Interactive Embedding Atlas visualization of 250,000 training examples from NVIDIA's Nemotron post-training v3 collection, colored by category. Distinct clusters are visible for Math (blue, 56k), Code (orange, 45k), Agentic (green, 41k), Instruction Following (red, 25k), Finance (purple, 18k), Multilingual (brown, 18k), Science (pink, 18k), Safety (grey, 16k), and Identity (yellow, 8k). A selected point shows an example from the Agentic function-calling dataset: "I need to know the weight of the creature that can evolve into a Fire Dragon."
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John F Wu @jwuphysics.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
This week I'll be delivering a talk and leading a tutorial for the Language AI in Space Sciences Workshop in Baltimore, hosted at STScI. So excited to see folks from all disciplines join the conversation -- including astronomers, engineers, computer scientists, librarians, and linguists.
Conference banner that states the text:

Language AI in Space Sciences Workshop (March 9th - 12th, 2026)

imposed over what looks like a JWST image of a galaxy cluster, and the contours that specify where some astronomy literature categories live in a UMAP-ed embedding space.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
I might suggest Toponymy (github.com/TutteInstitu...) and DataMapPlot (github.com/TutteInstitu...) as a way to clean up the labeling and display a little.
github.com
GitHub - TutteInstitute/toponymy
Contribute to TutteInstitute/toponymy development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Lynn Cherny @arnicas.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Han Jiao (ex jina Ai ceo) built mlx apple silicon clustering libs for umap, tsne etc github.com/hanxiao/mlx-...
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David Kouřil @dvdkouril.xyz · 27/02/2026
playing around with umap-js today.
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Moritz Stefaner / Truth & Beauty @moritzstefaner.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Excited to share a new #interactive #dataviz, putting 50 years of #neuroscience research on the map: The State of Neuroscience 2025 stateofneuroscience.thetransmitter.org #StateOfNeuro
stateofneuroscience.thetransmitter.org
State of Neuroscience 2025: Trends & Breakthroughs | The Transmitter
A comprehensive look at major trends shaping the neuroscience landscape in 2025
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David Picard @davidpicard.eurosky.social · 28/02/2026
Any sufficiently large k-nn is indistinguishable from magic 🧙‍♂️
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business goose🪿 @goose.art · 10/02/2026
become unclusterable
screenshot of map.sky.boo with a circle around a dot way off the main clustered area, a modal at the bottom right shows it as "Justin Kyle" daddysgaygarden13.bsky.social
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Some very nice ideas in there. Thanks for sharing!
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Theo Sanderson @theo.io · 08/02/2026
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
bluesky-map.theo.io
Bluesky Map
Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.
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Elisabetta Versace @elisabettaversace.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
Our new pre-print shows how unsupervised clustering methods can identify biologically meaningful differences in early vocal production, with no human feedback. @antorrisi.bsky.social has led this interdisciplinary collaboration based on computational methods + #chicks 🐣 arxiv.org/abs/2601.12203
A) Dendrogram of the development dataset showing the clustering structure and optimal cut points, and spectrograms of representative calls extracted from cluster 0 and cluster 1. Within the main
clusters, we observed further branching; B) UMAP projection divided into 𝐾 = 2 clusters using HAC.
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⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 26/01/2026
here's a fun side project i've been working on: i compiled a joint text<>audio embedding model to a fast coreml pipeline, and built a very fast (~400ms for 50k samples, can scale to millions) UMAP dimensionality reduction GPU impl in mlx. using it to browse music libraries and do sample sim search
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arXiv cs.LG Machine Learning @cslg-bot.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Xiaobin Li, Run Zhang: Understanding and Improving UMAP with Geometric and Topological Priors: The JORC-UMAP Algorithm arxiv.org/abs/2601.16552 arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16552 arxiv.org/html/2601.16552
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Vincent D. Warmerdam @koaning.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
I miss the days where you'd see blogposts with clever analyses on datasets, maths and data science tricks. That's why, as an experiment, we're starting a new moderated subreddit. People can share/promote their notebooks and you can use RSS to subscribe. Please join and share!
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Christopher Akiki @cakiki.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
UMAP connectivity plots of 3,627 chess openings from the @lichess.org datasets (huggingface.co/datasets/Lic...)
3 by 3 grid of networks color-mapped with "plasma" and with edge-bundling. Lung looking structure.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
If I had to guess a direction that could be taken that would ameliorate this, it would be "small models". It feels like it should be possible to have small enough models to run locally that are either "capable enough", or specialize in a domain. In that case training is the only compute bottleneck.
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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
I think it's important to note though that in spite of those incentives, the direction of the last two years has been more fungibility, *not* lock-in. And open source is the wrong fight here: when lock-in comes it will look more like the lock-in that Amazon or Uber have than Microsoft Office…
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Janis Keck @keckjanis.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
New preprint! Have you ever wondered, what are these fuzzy simplicial sets, the theoretical framework behind e.g. UMAP? Here we show that you may simply see them as marginal distributions over simplicial sets. This provides a generative model for UMAP. (1/2) arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899
arxiv.org
Probabilistic Foundations of Fuzzy Simplicial Sets for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction
Fuzzy simplicial sets have become an object of interest in dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, most prominently through their role in UMAP. However, their definition through tools from alg...
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luokai @luok.ai · 11/11/2025
Space DJ turns genre embeddings into a playable galaxy—pilot a ship, the music follows. 🚀 Key stats 768→128 PCA compression; 3D UMAP projection; three.js rendering; autopilot drift; high‑dim neighbors surfacing hidden similarities.
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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
Since 2018 if I recall correctly.
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mmalex @mmalex.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
via the magic of laion_clap embeddings and umap, my live coding thingy has a sample browser at last!
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