What is the Curse of Dimensionality?

What is the Curse of Dimensionality?

Approach: Describe how data becomes sparse as the number of features increases.

The phenomenon where the volume of the space increases so fast that the available data becomes sparse. In high-dimensional spaces, every point is an outlier, and the distance between points becomes nearly equidistant, making clustering or distance-based models difficult.

Follow-up: How does PCA help mitigate this?

Key concepts: feature space, euclidean distance, sparsity.