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We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-06-03 Jayadev Acharya , Ilias Diakonikolas , Jerry Li , Ludwig Schmidt

We study the question of testing structured properties (classes) of discrete distributions. Specifically, given sample access to an arbitrary distribution $D$ over $[n]$ and a property $\mathcal{P}$, the goal is to distinguish between…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-01-22 Clément L. Canonne , Ilias Diakonikolas , Themis Gouleakis , Ronitt Rubinfeld

A remarkable recent paper by Rubinfeld and Vasilyan (2022) initiated the study of \emph{testable learning}, where the goal is to replace hard-to-verify distributional assumptions (such as Gaussianity) with efficiently testable ones and to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Aravind Gollakota , Adam R. Klivans , Pravesh K. Kothari

Given i.i.d.~samples from an unknown distribution $P$, the goal of distribution learning is to recover the parameters of a distribution that is close to $P$. When $P$ belongs to the class of product distributions on the Boolean hypercube…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Davin Choo , Philips George John , Themis Gouleakis

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs), via their induced flow maps, provide a powerful framework to parameterize invertible transformations for the purpose of representing complex probability distributions. While such models have achieved…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-06 Youssef Marzouk , Zhi Ren , Sven Wang , Jakob Zech

We consider the classical problem of learning, with arbitrary accuracy, the natural parameters of a $k$-parameter truncated \textit{minimal} exponential family from i.i.d. samples in a computationally and statistically efficient manner. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Abhin Shah , Devavrat Shah , Gregory W. Wornell

We consider the problem of identifying, from its first $m$ noisy moments, a probability distribution on $[0,1]$ of support $k<\infty$. This is equivalent to the problem of learning a distribution on $m$ observable binary random variables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Spencer Gordon , Bijan Mazaheri , Leonard J. Schulman , Yuval Rabani

Multi-distribution learning (MDL), which seeks to learn a shared model that minimizes the worst-case risk across $k$ distinct data distributions, has emerged as a unified framework in response to the evolving demand for robustness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Zihan Zhang , Wenhao Zhan , Yuxin Chen , Simon S. Du , Jason D. Lee

We conduct a KL-divergence based procedure for testing elliptical distributions. The procedure simultaneously takes into account the two defining properties of an elliptically distributed random vector: independence between length and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Yin Tang , Yanyuan Ma , Bing Li

We study the following distribution clustering problem: Given a hidden partition of $k$ distributions into two groups, such that the distributions within each group are the same, and the two distributions associated with the two clusters…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Gunjan Kumar , Yash Pote , Jonathan Scarlett

The k-nearest-neighbor method performs classification tasks for a query sample based on the information contained in its neighborhood. Previous studies into the k-nearest-neighbor algorithm usually achieved the decision value for a class by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-10 Chengsheng Mao , Bin Hu , Lei Chen , Philip Moore , Xiaowei Zhang

We study the problem of testing discrete distributions with a focus on the high probability regime. Specifically, given samples from one or more discrete distributions, a property $\mathcal{P}$, and parameters $0< \epsilon, \delta <1$, we…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Ilias Diakonikolas , Themis Gouleakis , Daniel M. Kane , John Peebles , Eric Price

Shadow tomography for quantum states provides a sample efficient approach for predicting the properties of quantum systems when the properties are restricted to expectation values of $2$-outcome POVMs. However, these shadow tomography…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-09-08 Weiyuan Gong , Scott Aaronson

Learning a robust classifier from a few samples remains a key challenge in machine learning. A major thrust of research has been focused on developing $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) based algorithms combined with metric learning that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-17 Shixiang Zhu , Liyan Xie , Minghe Zhang , Rui Gao , Yao Xie

In learning theory, a standard assumption is that the data is generated from a finite mixture model. But what happens when the number of components is not known in advance? The problem of estimating the number of components, also called…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Jerry Li , Allen Liu , Ankur Moitra

Distribution testing deals with what information can be deduced about an unknown distribution over $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, where the algorithm is only allowed to obtain a relatively small number of independent samples from the distribution. In…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-09-23 Eldar Fischer , Oded Lachish , Yadu Vasudev

Distributed learning of probabilistic models from multiple data repositories with minimum communication is increasingly important. We study a simple communication-efficient learning framework that first calculates the local maximum…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-10-13 Qiang Liu , Alexander Ihler

This paper studies clustering of data sequences using the k-medoids algorithm. All the data sequences are assumed to be generated from \emph{unknown} continuous distributions, which form clusters with each cluster containing a composite set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-27 Tiexing Wang , Qunwei Li , Donald J. Bucci , Yingbin Liang , Biao Chen , Pramod K. Varshney

We consider the problem of learning parametric distributions from their quantized samples in a network. Specifically, $n$ agents or sensors observe independent samples of an unknown parametric distribution; and each of them uses $k$ bits to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Septimia Sarbu , Abdellatif Zaidi

Comparing $K$-sample distributions is a fundamental problem in data science that arises in a wide variety of fields and applications. In this article, we introduce a maximum-of-differences approach to make such comparisons. Specifically, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-13 Wei Lan , Long Feng , Runze Li , Chih-Ling Tsai