t-SNE Choosing the Number of Dimensions

Question

I am using t-SNE for exploratory data analysis. I am using this instead of PCA because PCA is linear and t-SNE is non-linear.

It's really straight-forward to know how many dimensions are required to capture the necessary variance with PCA. How do I know how many dimensions are required for my data using t-SNE?

I have read a popular website of very useful information, but it doesn't discuss dimensionality. https://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/

Answer 1

It is best to start with 2 and experiment using higher values. Then analyse the visualisation and performance to know which gives a better clarity of results. This is the approach I used when using t-sne for my project