estimate a density in 1D to 24,000 samples in 3D! Imagine what happens if we went to 50D! The Curse of Dimensionality • The severe difficulty that can arise in spaces of many dimensions is sometimes called the curse of dimensionality (Bellman, 1961) • Bellman R. (1961) “Adaptive Control Processes.” Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. • Although this is now a power law growth, rather than an exponential growth, it still points to the method becoming rapidly unwieldy and of limited practical utility • You have been be warned, however, that not all intuitions developed in spaces of low dimensionality will generalize to spaces of many dimensions 31 / 45