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We study the problem of estimating the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) between probability distributions when given access only to samples. We give closeness testers and additive-error estimators over domains in $[0, \Delta]^d$, with sample…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2009-04-03 Khanh Do Ba , Huy L Nguyen , Huy N Nguyen , Ronitt Rubinfeld

We introduce kernel thinning, a new procedure for compressing a distribution $\mathbb{P}$ more effectively than i.i.d. sampling or standard thinning. Given a suitable reproducing kernel $\mathbf{k}_{\star}$ and $O(n^2)$ time, kernel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-14 Raaz Dwivedi , Lester Mackey

Suppose two networks are observed for the same set of nodes, where each network is assumed to be generated from a weighted stochastic block model. This paper considers the problem of testing whether the community memberships of the two…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-12-03 Yezheng Li , Hongzhe Li

We give an algorithm for learning a mixture of {\em unstructured} distributions. This problem arises in various unsupervised learning scenarios, for example in learning {\em topic models} from a corpus of documents spanning several topics.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-09-19 Yuval Rabani , Leonard Schulman , Chaitanya Swamy

We use the Sum of Squares method to develop new efficient algorithms for learning well-separated mixtures of Gaussians and robust mean estimation, both in high dimensions, that substantially improve upon the statistical guarantees achieved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

The bin packing problem is to find the minimum number of bins of size one to pack a list of items with sizes $a_1,..., a_n$ in $(0,1]$. Using uniform sampling, which selects a random element from the input list each time, we develop a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2011-02-25 Richard Beigel , Bin Fu

We consider the classical makespan minimization scheduling problem where $n$ jobs must be scheduled on $m$ identical machines. Using weighted random sampling, we developed two sublinear time approximation schemes: one for the case where $n$…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Bin Fu , Yumei Huo , Hairong Zhao

We present new algorithms for estimating and testing \emph{collision probability}, a fundamental measure of the spread of a discrete distribution that is widely used in many scientific fields. We describe an algorithm that satisfies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Robert Busa-Fekete , Umar Syed

The classic problems of testing uniformity of and learning a discrete distribution, given access to independent samples from it, are examined under general $\ell_p$ metrics. The intuitions and results often contrast with the classic…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-03-24 Bo Waggoner

Classical dependence measures such as Pearson correlation, Spearman's $\rho$, and Kendall's $\tau$ can detect only monotonic or linear dependence. To overcome these limitations, Szekely et al.(2007) proposed distance covariance as a…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-07 Arin Chaudhuri , Wenhao Hu

Integer Linear Programming with $n$ binary variables and $m$ many $0/1$-constraints can be solved in time $2^{\tilde O(m^2)} \text{poly}(n)$ and it is open whether the dependence on $m$ is optimal. Several seemingly unrelated problems,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Lars Rohwedder , Karol Węgrzycki

We consider the problem of estimating a $d$-dimensional $s$-sparse discrete distribution from its samples observed under a $b$-bit communication constraint. The best-known previous result on $\ell_2$ estimation error for this problem is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-17 Wei-Ning Chen , Peter Kairouz , Ayfer Özgür

Finding the underlying probability distributions of a set of observed sequences under the constraint that each sequence is generated i.i.d by a distinct distribution is considered. The number of distributions, and hence the number of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Sara Shahi , Daniela Tuninetti , Natasha Devroye

The classic exact pattern matching problem, given two strings -- a pattern $P$ of length $m$ and a text $T$ of length $n$ -- asks whether $P$ occurs as a substring of $T$. A property tester for the problem needs to distinguish (with high…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Ce Jin , Tomasz Kociumaka

We consider the classic Facility Location, $k$-Median, and $k$-Means problems in metric spaces of doubling dimension $d$. We give nearly linear-time approximation schemes for each problem. The complexity of our algorithms is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Vincent Cohen-Addad , Andreas Emil Feldmann , David Saulpic

We study sublinear algorithms for two fundamental graph problems, MAXCUT and correlation clustering. Our focus is on constructing core-sets as well as developing streaming algorithms for these problems. Constant space algorithms are known…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Aditya Bhaskara , Samira Daruki , Suresh Venkatasubramanian

We propose sublinear algorithms for probabilistic testing of the discrete and continuous Fr\'echet distance - a standard similarity measure for curves. We assume the algorithm is given access to the input curves via a query oracle: a query…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Peyman Afshani , Maike Buchin , Anne Driemel , Marena Richter , Sampson Wong

Computing the similarity between two probability distributions is a recurring theme across control. We introduce a unified family of distances between the probability distributions of two random variables that is based on the discrepancy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Alexandros E. Tzikas , Arec Jamgochian , Nazim Kemal Ure , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Stephen P. Boyd

We study the problem of efficiently detecting Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples at test time in supervised and unsupervised learning contexts. While ML models are typically trained under the assumption that training and test data stem from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Alberto Caron , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

We study the classic $k$-means/median clustering, which are fundamental problems in unsupervised learning, in the setting where data are partitioned across multiple sites, and where we are allowed to discard a small portion of the data by…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-10-12 Jiecao Chen , Erfan Sadeqi Azer , Qin Zhang