Machine Learning in Java - Second Edition

The curse of dimensionality

The curse of dimensionality refers to a situation where we have a large number of features, often hundreds or thousands, which lead to an extremely large space with sparse data and, consequently, to distance anomalies. For instance, in high dimensions, almost all pairs of points are equally distant from each other; in fact, almost all of the pairs have distance close to the average distance. Another manifestation of the curse is that any two vectors are almost orthogonal, which means all of the angles are close to 90 degrees. This practically makes any distance measurement useless.

A cure for the curse of dimensionality might be found in one of the data reduction techniques, where we want to reduce the number of ...