Approaches to analysis of data that concentrate near higher-dimensional manifolds
Jerome H. Friedman, John W. Tukey, Paul A. Tukey · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1979
The need to explore structure in high-dimensional clouds of data points that may concentrate near (possibly nonlinear) manifolds of lower dimension led to the current development of three new approaches. The first is a computer-graphic system (PRIM'79) that facilitates interactive viewing and manipulation of an ensemble of points. The other two are automatic procedures for separating a cloud into more manageable pieces. One of these (BIDEC) performs successive partitioning of the cloud by use of hyperplanes; the other (Cake Maker) explores expanding sequences of neighborhoods. Both procedures provide facilities for examining the resulting pieces and the relationships among them.