The Category Theory Behind UMAP

An interesting situation has arisen. Some people working on applied category theory have been seeking a ‘killer app’: that is, an application of category theory to practical tasks that would be so compelling it would force the world to admit categories are useful. Meanwhile, the UMAP algorithm, based to some extent on category theory, has become very important in genomics:

• Leland McInnes, John Healy and James Melville, UMAP: uniform manifold approximation and projection for dimension...