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Figure 1 | BMC Neuroscience

Figure 1

From: The structure of human olfactory space

Figure 1

Odorants in the perceptual space. (A) Each of the 144 odorants can be represented as a point in the 146D space of perceptual (semantic) descriptors. The odorants are shown by blue crosses placed in this projection onto the 3D space of principal components. (B) When viewed from a certain direction, the odorants clustered near a C-shaped 1D curve, suggesting that in 3D the odorants are distributed close to a 2D curved surface. The 2D surface shown represents the best fit to the data. The odorants (blue crosses) are connected to the nearest points on the surface by the red lines representing the residual errors. The 2D surface minimizes the total squared length of the residuals computed in 146D. The total squared length of residuals can be viewed as the remaining variance in the data not accounted for by the projection onto the 2D curved manifold. The residual variance constitutes <50% of the total variance in the case of 2D curved manifold.

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