AI engineering glossary · ML fundamentals
What is curse of dimensionality?
Curse of dimensionality: A group of problems that appear when data has many features: the space grows so fast that data becomes sparse, distances between points lose meaning and far more examples are needed to cover it. It harms methods such as nearest neighbours and encourages feature reduction.
Curse of dimensionality: an example
Covering a 1-D range with 10 points is easy, but keeping the same density in 10 dimensions would need 10 billion points.
Related terms
- Dimensionality reduction
- Feature space
- Overfitting
- Sample complexity
More ML fundamentals terms
- Data leakage
- Data snooping
- Data-centric AI
- Dataset
- Decision threshold
- Discriminative model
- Distribution shift
- Double descent
Where you learn it
Curse of dimensionality is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.