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We present a computational method for extracting simple descriptions of high dimensional data sets in the form of simplicial complexes. Our method, called Mapper, is based on the idea of partial clustering of the data guided by a set of functions defined on the data. The proposed method is not dependent on any particular clustering algorithm, ie any clustering algorithm may be used with Mapper. We implement this method and present a few sample applications in which simple descriptions of the data present important information about its structure.