EmbeddingTree: Hierarchical Exploration of Entity Features in Embedding
Yan Zheng Junpeng Wang Chin-Chia Michael Yeh Yujie Fan Huiyuan Chen Liang Wang Wei Zhang
Embedding learning transforms discrete data entities into continuous
numerical representations, encoding features/properties of the entities.
Despite the outstanding performance reported from different embedding learning
algorithms, few efforts were devoted to structurally interpreting how features
are encoded in the learned embedding space. This work proposes EmbeddingTree, a
hierarchical embedding exploration algorithm that relates the semantics of
entity features with the less-interpretable embedding vectors. An interactive
visualization tool is also developed based on EmbeddingTree to explore
high-dimensional embeddings. The tool helps users discover nuance features of
data entities, perform feature denoising/injecting in embedding training, and
generate embeddings for unseen entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of
EmbeddingTree and our visualization tool through embeddings generated for
industry-scale merchant data and the public 30Music listening/playlists
dataset.