Comment by brig90

Great points — thank you. PCA gave me surprisingly clean separation early on, so I stuck with it for the initial run. But you’re right — throwing UMAP or t-SNE at it would definitely give a nonlinear perspective that could catch subtler patterns (or failure cases).

And yes to the cross-cluster reference idea — I didn’t build a similarity matrix between clusters, but now that you’ve said it, it feels like an obvious next step to test how much signal is really being captured.

Might spin those up as a follow-up. Appreciate the thoughtful nudge.