1 research outputs found
Fractional norms and quasinorms do not help to overcome the curse of dimensionality
The curse of dimensionality causes the well-known and widely discussed
problems for machine learning methods. There is a hypothesis that using of the
Manhattan distance and even fractional quasinorms lp (for p less than 1) can
help to overcome the curse of dimensionality in classification problems. In
this study, we systematically test this hypothesis. We confirm that fractional
quasinorms have a greater relative contrast or coefficient of variation than
the Euclidean norm l2, but we also demonstrate that the distance concentration
shows qualitatively the same behaviour for all tested norms and quasinorms and
the difference between them decays as dimension tends to infinity. Estimation
of classification quality for kNN based on different norms and quasinorms shows
that a greater relative contrast does not mean better classifier performance
and the worst performance for different databases was shown by different norms
(quasinorms). A systematic comparison shows that the difference of the
performance of kNN based on lp for p=2, 1, and 0.5 is statistically
insignificant