Abstract
For any multi-fractal dynamical system, a precise estimate of the local dimension is essential to infer variations in its number of degrees of freedom. Following extreme value theory, a local dimension may be estimated from the distributions of pairwise distances within the dataset. For absolutely continuous random variables and in the absence of zeros and singularities, the theoretical value of this local dimension is constant and equals the phase-space dimension. However, due to uneven sampling across the dataset, practical estimations of the local dimension may diverge from this theoretical value, depending on both the phase-space dimension and the position at which the dimension is estimated. To explore such variations of the estimated local dimension of absolutely continuous random variables, approximate analytical expressions are derived and further assessed in numerical experiments. These variations are expressed as a function of 1. the random variables' probability density function, 2. the threshold used to compute the local dimension, and 3. the phase-space dimension. Largest deviations are anticipated when the probability density function has a low absolute value, and a high absolute value of its Laplacian. Numerical simulations of random variables of dimension 1 to 30 allow to assess the validity of the approximate analytical expressions. These effects may become important for systems of moderately-high dimension and in case of limited-size datasets. We suggest to take into account this source of local variation of dimension estimates in future studies of empirical data. Implications for weather regimes are discussed.