I think the Wikipedia article on the Curse covers it pretty well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse

I think the Wikipedia article on the Curse covers it pretty well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality The common theme of these problems is that when the dimensionality increases, the volume of the space increases so fast that the available data become sparse. This sparsity is problematic for any method that requires statistical significance. In order to obtain a statistically sound and reliable result, the amount of data needed to support the result often grows exponentially with the dimensionality. Also, organizing and searching data often relies on detecting areas where objects form groups with similar properties; in high dimensional data, however, all objects appear to be sparse and dissimilar in many ways, which prevents common data organization strategies from being efficient.