Ways to test the validity/usefulness/salience of your data

[rodrigo.constanzo]

@tedmoore

If you decide to feed UMAP a dataset with n dimensions, the n Principal Components will always (!?) be better for UMAP to consume than n of the original dimensions, even if those dimensions are selected in some clever way such as the PCA/SVM thing.

I missed the last bit of this on my first read/response. I thought you meant that the bits selected by PCA would be the best.

Is this from your experience/testing or is this like one of those “known” things? On first blush it seems super counterintuitive to me (like transcoding video files).