The Curse of Dimensionality

from Lecture 2, ECE662, Spring 2010


Refers to the problem caused by exponential growth of hypervolume as a function of dimensionality. This term was coined by Richard Bellman in 1961.

As stated in Lecture 3 - Bayes classification_Old Kiwi, The curse of dimensionality starts at d>17-23. There are no clusters or groupings of data points when d>17. In practice each point turns to be a cluster on its own and as a result this explodes into a high dimensional feature vectors which are impossible to handle in computation.


Back to Lecture 2, ECE662, Spring 2010

Alumni Liaison

Prof. Math. Ohio State and Associate Dean
Outstanding Alumnus Purdue Math 2008

Jeff McNeal