Does this all translate to doing high-dimensional distance with random
projection? Project each vector to one dimension and subtract? This sounds
like a really useful distance measure.

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 7:32 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote:

> The distribution of the dot product of two randomly chosen, uniformly
> distributed unit vectors is roughly normally distributed with a standard
> deviation that declines with increasing dimension roughly with your
> observed
> sqrt scaling factor.
>
> In fact, it is just this scaling property that makes the stochastic SVD
> work
> with high probability of high accuracy.  The general property that random
> unit vectors are nearly orthogonal is called "quasi-orthogonality"
>
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Sean Owen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Right, that's not quite the issue. It's that some comparisons are made
> > in 2-space, some in 10-space, etc. It would be nice to have some idea
> > that a distance is 2-space is "about as meaningfully far" as some
> > other distance in 10-space. I'm trying to find the order of that
> > correcting factor and it seems to be sqrt(n). Within 2- or 10-space
> > indeed those distances aren't randomly distributed... but would they
> > be so differently distributed as to change this factor? Gut says no,
> > but I have no more justification than that.
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]>
> > wrote:
> > > None of this actually applies because real data are not uniformly
> > > distributed (not even close).  Do the sampling on your own data and
> pick
> > a
> > > good guess from that.
> > >
> > > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Sean Owen <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > >> Ah, I'm looking for the distance between points within, rather than
> > >> on, the hypercube. (Think of it as random rating vectors, in the range
> > >> 0..1, across all movies. They're not binary ratings but ratings from 0
> > >> to 1.)
> > >>
> > >> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Justin Cranshaw <[email protected]>
> > >> wrote:
> > >> > I think the analytic answer should be sqrt(n/2).
> > >> >
> > >> > So let's suppose X and Y are random points in the n dimensional
> > hypercube
> > >> {0,1}^n.  Let Z_i be an indicator variable that is 1 if X_i != Y_i and
> 0
> > >> otherwise.  Then d(X,Y)^2 =sum (X_i - Y_i)^2 = sum( Z_i).  Then the
> > expected
> > >> squared distance is E d(X,Y)^2 = sum( E Z_i) = sum( Pr[ X_i != Y_i]) =
> > n/2.
> > >> >
> > >> >
> > >>
> > >
> >
>



-- 
Lance Norskog
[email protected]

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