Unsupervised Feature Selection Using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality -- Extended Version

arXiv:2610.40736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High dimensionality degrades both the efficiency and the effectiveness of learning algorithms, and in many applications no class labels are available to guide dimensionality reduction. This paper proposes LIDFS, an unsupervised feature selection method based on Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID). The method builds on the formal equivalence between LID and the indiscriminability of distance measures. The data matrix is transposed so that each feature is treated as a point, and the LID of each feature is estimated by maximum likelihood from the distances to its $k$ nearest neighboring features. Features with lower LID exhibit greater local discriminability and receive higher importance scores.