Information loss due to UMAP dimension reduction of morphospace

Derive a quantitative estimate of the biologically relevant information lost when reducing the 85-dimensional morphospace of MDA-MB-468 cell morphological features to a 2-dimensional UMAP projection for analyzing EMT morphodynamics.

Background

The authors use UMAP to project 85-dimensional morphological feature data into two dimensions to analyze cell morphodynamics during EMT, assuming that the effective dynamics lies on a lower-dimensional manifold.

They caution that there is no a priori method to verify this assumption and explicitly note the absence of any estimate for biologically relevant information potentially lost during dimension reduction, highlighting a need for quantitative assessment.