Measuring geometric similarity between high-dimensional network representations is a topic of longstanding interest to neuroscience and deep learning. Although many methods have been proposed, only a few works have rigorously analyzed their statistical efficiency or quantified estimator uncertainty in data-limited regimes. Here, we derive upper and lower bounds on the worst-case convergence of standard estimators of shape distance$\unicode{x2014}$a measure of representational dissimilarity proposed by Williams et al. (2021). These bounds reveal the challenging nature of the problem in high-dimensional feature spaces. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new method-of-moments estimator with a tunable bias-variance tradeoff. We show that this estimator achieves superior performance to standard estimators in simulation and on neural data, particularly in high-dimensional settings. Thus, we lay the foundation for a rigorous statistical theory for high-dimensional shape analysis, and we contribute a new estimation method that is well-suited to practical scientific settings.

通过推导上、下界，分析了高维网络表示的几何相似性测量方法的统计效率和估计不确定性，提出了一种新的矩法估计器，在高维特征空间中优于标准估计器，为高维形状分析奠定了统计理论基础。

利用有限样本在神经表示上估计形状距离