How to discuss the meaning of 2D UMAP figure

[SongLin99]

Hello, dear developer.
I am writing a review using bertopic topic modeling techniques, "Visualize documents with DataMapPlot" provides very beautiful and intuitive visualization effects for documents and topics,
I think this image has two functions

1. Prove the reliability of the HDBSCAN algorithm
2. Check the similarity of topics by their distance
   

However, Few other literature presents this graph in the results.
They often use the Intertopic Distance Map or Visualize Topic Similarity Matrix to show the structure of topics.
In my result, I need to categorize 27 themes into 7 groups, but using these two approaches to classify themes does not align with my experience, so i didn`t use them.

I have two questions:
1.Is it reasonable to use DataMapPlot to help classify topics?
2.How to introduce DataMapPlot in an article? (Some people ask me about the meanings of the horizontal and vertical axes in the plot, but I say they are just the result of dimensionality reduction and have no meaning)

[MaartenGr]

1.Is it reasonable to use DataMapPlot to help classify topics?

The problem with that approach is that the original BERTopic model most likely used 5 dimensions and this is a 2-dimensional plot. As such, it is merely an approximation of the 5d representation. Higher dimensionality helps uncover more complex relationships/structure.

2. For that, I would advise checking out the original UMAP paper.