[youoy]

The closest thing that you may get is a manifold + noise. Maybe some people thing about it in that way. Think for example of the graph of y=sin(x)+noise, you can say that this is a 1 dimensional data manifold. And you can say that locally a data manifold is something that looks like a graph or embedding (with more dimensions) plus noise.

But i am skeptical whether this definition can be useful in the real world of algorithms. For example you can define things like topological data analysis, but the applications are limited, mainly due to the curse of dimensionality.

[qbit42]

Sometimes statistical rates for empirical risk minimization can be related to the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold (and noise level if present). In such cases, you are running the same algorithm but getting a performance guarantee that depends on the structure of the data, stronger when it is low dimensional.