Setosa.io
Setosa.io is a website that provides interactive visual explanations and applets for understanding complex topics and concepts, particularly in data science and machine learning.
About:
- It is an “experiment in making hard ideas intuitive” inspired by Bret Victor’s work on explorable explanations.
- It features interactive visualizations and applets that allow users to explore and play around with concepts like principal component analysis (PCA), image kernels, and more.
- The PCA applet on setosa.io is praised as “a great way to play around with data and convince yourself why it makes sense” for understanding PCA. It visually demonstrates how PCA finds new coordinate systems to emphasize variation in high-dimensional data.
- The image kernels applet illustrates how small matrix kernels can apply effects like blurring, sharpening, and edge detection to images, which is useful for image processing and convolutional neural networks.
- In addition to the interactive applets, setosa.io has blog posts that provide textual explanations of complex topics using the interactive visualizations as aids.