Minimax Lower Bound for Estimating Diffusion-based Local Intrinsic Dimension

While diffusion-based methods have recently emerged as effective tools for probing the intrinsic geometry of high-dimensional data, their statistical difficulty remains largely unexplored. We study estimation of the finite-scale population functional underlying FLIPD (Kamkari et al., 2024; arXiv:2406.03537), a diffusion-based local intrinsic dimension (LID) quantity defined through the logarithmic scale derivative of a Gaussian-smoothed density. Intuitively, Gaussian smoothing turns local dimension into a scale law: near a d-dimensional manifold, the kernel mass grows like σ d, so differentiating with respect to the noise scale reveals the intrinsic exponent. Under a regular manifold model, we show uniformly over the model class that the finite-scale field differs from the manifold dimension d by at most O(σ 2). We then establish a minimax lower bound of order (nσ d)-1 for estimating this finite-scale field from n observations, for n-1/(2α+d) σ σ 0. At the smallest scale covered by our lower-bound construction, the bound becomes the nonparametric rate n-2α/(2α+d).