Title
Blessing of dimensionality: mathematical foundations of the statistical physics of data.
Abstract
The concentrations of measure phenomena were discovered as the mathematical background to statistical mechanics at the end of the nineteenth/ beginning of the twentieth century and have been explored in mathematics ever since. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it became clear that the proper utilization of these phenomena in machine learning might transform the curse of dimensionality into the blessing of dimensionality. This paper summarizes recently discovered phenomena of measure concentration which drastically simplify some machine learning problems in high dimension, and allow us to correct legacy artificial intelligence systems. The classical concentration of measure theorems state that i.i.d. random points are concentrated in a thin layer near a surface (a sphere or equators of a sphere, an average or median-level set of energy or another Lipschitz function, etc.). The new stochastic separation theorems describe the thin structure of these thin layers: the random points are not only concentrated in a thin layer but are all linearly separable from the rest of the set, even for exponentially large random sets. The linear functionals for separation of points can be selected in the form of the linear Fisher's discriminant. All artificial intelligence systems make errors. Non-destructive correction requires separation of the situations (samples) with errors from the samples corresponding to correct behaviour by a simple and robust classifier. The stochastic separation theorems provide us with such classifiers and determine a non-iterative (one-shot) procedure for their construction. This article is part of the theme issue 'Hilbert's sixth problem'.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1098/rsta.2017.0237
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY A-MATHEMATICAL PHYSICAL AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES
Keywords
Field
DocType
measure concentration,extreme points,ensemble equivalence,Fisher's discriminant,linear separability
Statistical physics,Extreme point,Linear separability,Statistical mechanics,Concentration of measure,Discriminant,Curse of dimensionality,Lipschitz continuity,Classifier (linguistics),Physics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
376
2118
1364-503X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.56
14
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexander N Gorban19016.13
Ivan Yu. Tyukin2565.33