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Equation 7 · Embeddings and the Geometry of Similarity

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ε>0\varepsilon > 0

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ε\varepsilon

Symbol varepsilon

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for every ε\varepsilon > 0 [ 11 ] . The condition is on the relative variance of the distance distribution: when distances stop varying much relative to their own mean, the nearest neighbour stops being distinguishable from everything else. The authors call such a query unstable , and their empirical work shows the effect appearing with as few as 10 to 15 dimensions on both synthetic and real data — while explicitly warning that the result does not mean high-dimensional indexing is never meaningful, since particular workloads escape the conditions [ 11 ] .

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