Concentration of Measure for Radial Distributions and Consequences for Statistical Modeling

Abstract

Motivated by problems in high-dimensional statistics such as mixture modeling for classification and clustering, we consider the behavior of radial densities as the dimension increases. We establish a form of concentration of measure, and even a convergence in distribution, under additional assumptions. This extends the well-known behavior of the normal distribution (its concentration around the sphere of radius square-root of the dimension) to other radial densities. We draw some possible consequences for statistical modeling in high-dimensions, including a possible universality property of Gaussian mixtures.