Intrinsic Dimensionality Estimation for High-dimensional Data Sets: New Approaches for the Computation of Correlation Dimension

Abstract

The analysis of high–dimensional data is usually challenging since many standard modelling approaches tend to break down due to the so–called “curse of dimensionality”. Dimension reduction techniques, which reduce the data set (explicitly or implicitly) to a smaller number of variables, make the data analysis more efficient and are furthermore useful for visualization purposes. However, most dimension reduction techniques require fixing the intrinsic dimension of the low-dimensional subspace in advance. The intrinsic dimension can be estimated by fractal dimension estimation methods, which exploit the intrinsic geometry of a data set. The most popular concept from this family of methods is the correlation dimension, which requires estimation of the correlation integral for a ball of radius tending to 0. In this paper we propose approaches to approximate the correlation integral in this limit. Experimental results on real world and simulated data are used to demonstrate the algorithms and compare to other methodology. A simulation study which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed methods is also provided.