IDEA: Intrinsic dimension estimation algorithm

Abstract

The high dimensionality of some real life signals makes the usage of the most common signal processing and pattern recognition methods unfeasible. For this reason, in literature a great deal of research work has been devoted to the development of algorithms performing dimensionality reduction. To this aim, an useful help could be provided by the estimation of the intrinsic dimensionality of a given dataset, that is the minimum number of parameters needed to capture, and describe, all the information carried by the data. Although many techniques have been proposed, most of them fail in case of noisy data or when the intrinsic dimensionality is too high. In this paper we propose a local intrinsic dimension estimator exploiting the statistical properties of data neighborhoods. The algorithm evaluation on both synthetic and real datasets, and the comparison with state of the art algorithms, proves that the proposed technique is promising. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.