Q10Machine Learning
Question
2 marks
What is the curse of dimensionality?
Answer
The curse of dimensionality is a catastrophic mathematical phenomenon where adding more features exponentially increases the volume of the data space, rendering distance metrics completely meaningless.
As the number of dimensions (features) increases past 50, the mathematical distance between ANY two random points becomes nearly identical. Algorithms relying on Euclidean distance (like K-Nearest Neighbors or K-Means) completely break down because the concept of "closeness" mathematically ceases to exist in hyper-dimensional space.