  Progressive Visual Analytics aims at improving the interactivity in existing
analytics techniques by means of visualization as well as interaction with
intermediate results. One key method for data analysis is dimensionality
reduction, for example, to produce 2D embeddings that can be visualized and
analyzed efficiently. t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (tSNE) is a
well-suited technique for the visualization of several high-dimensional data.
tSNE can create meaningful intermediate results but suffers from a slow
initialization that constrains its application in Progressive Visual Analytics.
We introduce a controllable tSNE approximation (A-tSNE), which trades off speed
and accuracy, to enable interactive data exploration. We offer real-time
visualization techniques, including a density-based solution and a Magic Lens
to inspect the degree of approximation. With this feedback, the user can decide
on local refinements and steer the approximation level during the analysis. We
demonstrate our technique with several datasets, in a real-world research
scenario and for the real-time analysis of high-dimensional streams to
illustrate its effectiveness for interactive data analysis.
