Understanding High-Dimensional Spaces

High-dimensional spaces arise as a way of modelling datasets with many attributes. Such a dataset can be directly represented in a space spanned by its attributes, with each record represented as a point in the space with its position depending on its attribute values. Such spaces are not easy to work with because of their high dimensionality: our intuition about space is not reliable, and measures such as distance do not provide as clear information as we might expect. There are three main area