Estimating intrinsic dimensionality of data is a classic problem in pattern recognition and statistics. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a powerful tool in discovering dimensionality of data sets with a linear structure; it, however, becomes ineffective when data have a nonlinear structure. In this paper, we propose a new PCA-based method to estimate intrinsic dimension of data with nonlinear structures. Our method works by first finding a minimal cover of the data set, then performing PCA locally on each subset in the cover and finally giving the estimation result by checking up the data variance on all small neighborhood regions. The proposed method utilizes the whole data set to estimate its intrinsic dimension and is convenient for incremental learning. In addition, our new PCA procedure can filter out noise in data and converge to a stable estimation with the neighborhood region size increasing. Experiments on synthetic and real world data sets show effectiveness of the proposed method.

本文介绍了一种基于PCA的新方法，用于估计具有非线性结构的数据的内在维数，该方法利用整个数据集估计其内在维数，并方便增量学习。该方法使用数据的最小覆盖来处理数据集的非线性结构，并通过检查所有小邻域区域的数据方差来确定估计结果。实验结果表明，该方法可以过滤数据中的噪声，并在邻域区域大小增加时收敛到稳定的估计值。

用主成分分析估计数据的内在维度