umap-learn

UMAP-Learn

Overview

UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a dimensionality reduction technique for visualization and general non-linear dimensionality reduction. Apply this skill for fast, scalable embeddings that preserve local and global structure, supervised learning, and clustering preprocessing.

Quick Start

Installation

Current stable release: umap-learn 0.5.12 (released April 2026). Requires Python 3.9+ and depends on scikit-learn>=1.6, numba, pynndescent, numpy, and scipy. Pin to a verified release:

uv pip install umap-learn==0.5.12

Basic Usage

UMAP follows scikit-learn conventions and can be used as a drop-in replacement for t-SNE or PCA.

import umap
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler

# Prepare data (standardization is essential)
scaled_data = StandardScaler().fit_transform(data)

# Method 1: Single step (fit and transform)
embedding = umap.UMAP().fit_transform(scaled_data)

# Method 2: Separate steps (for reusing trained model)
reducer = umap.UMAP(random_state=42)
reducer.fit(scaled_data)
embedding = reducer.embedding_  # Access the trained embedding

Preprocessing requirement: Match preprocessing to the metric. For numeric Euclidean-style metrics, scale features before fitting so high-variance columns do not dominate. For cosine, binary, precomputed-distance, or mixed-feature workflows, choose preprocessing that matches the metric instead of blindly standardizing every column.

Typical Workflow

import umap
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler

# 1. Preprocess data
scaler = StandardScaler()
scaled_data = scaler.fit_transform(raw_data)

# 2. Create and fit UMAP
reducer = umap.UMAP(
    n_neighbors=15,
    min_dist=0.1,
    n_components=2,
    metric='euclidean',
    random_state=42
)
embedding = reducer.fit_transform(scaled_data)

# 3. Visualize
plt.scatter(embedding[:, 0], embedding[:, 1], c=labels, cmap='Spectral', s=5)
plt.colorbar()
plt.title('UMAP Embedding')
plt.show()