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We examine the extent to which sublinear-sample property testing and estimation apply to settings where samples are independently but not identically distributed. Specifically, we consider the following distributional property testing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Shivam Garg , Chirag Pabbaraju , Kirankumar Shiragur , Gregory Valiant

Towards understanding the statistical complexity of learning from heterogeneous sources, we study the problem of multi-distribution learning. Given $k$ data sources, the goal is to output a classifier for each source by exploiting shared…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Rafael Hanashiro , Abhishek Shetty , Patrick Jaillet

Estimating the density of a distribution from samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. In many practical settings, the Wasserstein distance is an appropriate error metric for density estimation. For example, when estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Vitaly Feldman , Audra McMillan , Satchit Sivakumar , Kunal Talwar

\textit{Mallows model} is a widely-used probabilistic framework for learning from ranking data, with applications ranging from recommendation systems and voting to aligning language models with human preferences~\cite{chen2024mallows,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-14 Yeganeh Alimohammadi , Kiana Asgari

Domain randomization in reinforcement learning is an established technique for increasing the robustness of control policies trained in simulation. By randomizing environment properties during training, the learned policy can become robust…

A fundamental notion of distance between train and test distributions from the field of domain adaptation is discrepancy distance. While in general hard to compute, here we provide the first set of provably efficient algorithms for testing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Gautam Chandrasekaran , Adam R. Klivans , Vasilis Kontonis , Konstantinos Stavropoulos , Arsen Vasilyan

In many learning applications, data are collected from multiple sources, each providing a \emph{batch} of samples that by itself is insufficient to learn its input-output relationship. A common approach assumes that the sources fall in one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Ayush Jain , Rajat Sen , Weihao Kong , Abhimanyu Das , Alon Orlitsky

This paper presents a distance-based discriminative framework for learning with probability distributions. Instead of using kernel mean embeddings or generalized radial basis kernels, we introduce embeddings based on dissimilarity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Alain Rakotomamonjy , Abraham Traoré , Maxime Berar , Rémi Flamary , Nicolas Courty

Empirical data can often be considered as samples from a set of probability distributions. Kernel methods have emerged as a natural approach for learning to classify these distributions. Although numerous kernels between distributions have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Oleksii Kachaiev , Stefano Recanatesi

We present an algorithm for testing halfspaces over arbitrary, unknown rotation-invariant distributions. Using $\tilde O(\sqrt{n}\epsilon^{-7})$ random examples of an unknown function $f$, the algorithm determines with high probability…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-02 Nathaniel Harms

A probability distribution over {-1, 1}^n is (eps, k)-wise uniform if, roughly, it is eps-close to the uniform distribution when restricted to any k coordinates. We consider the problem of how far an (eps, k)-wise uniform distribution can…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Ryan O'Donnell , Yu Zhao

In many applications, data is collected in batches, some of which are corrupt or even adversarial. Recent work derived optimal robust algorithms for estimating discrete distributions in this setting. We consider a general framework of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-26 Ayush Jain , Alon Orlitsky

In this paper we consider the problem of computing the likelihood of the profile of a discrete distribution, i.e., the probability of observing the multiset of element frequencies, and computing a profile maximum likelihood (PML)…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Nima Anari , Moses Charikar , Kirankumar Shiragur , Aaron Sidford

Many decision problems in science, engineering and economics are affected by uncertain parameters whose distribution is only indirectly observable through samples. The goal of data-driven decision-making is to learn a decision from finitely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-05 Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Viet Anh Nguyen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh

Learning of a smooth but nonparametric probability density can be regularized using methods of Quantum Field Theory. We implement a field theoretic prior numerically, test its efficacy, and show that the data and the phase space factors…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2007-05-23 Ilya Nemenman , William Bialek

Organisms and algorithms learn probability distributions from previous observations, either over evolutionary time or on the fly. In the absence of regularities, estimating the underlying distribution from data would require observing each…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-12-10 William Bialek , Stephanie E. Palmer , David J. Schwab

We study the general problem of testing whether an unknown distribution belongs to a specified family of distributions. More specifically, given a distribution family $\mathcal{P}$ and sample access to an unknown discrete distribution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-08-09 Clément L. Canonne , Ilias Diakonikolas , Alistair Stewart

A machine learning model that generalizes well should obtain low errors on unseen test examples. Thus, if we learn an optimal model in training data, it could have better generalization performance in testing tasks. However, learning such a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Penghao Jiang , Xin Ke , ZiFeng Wang , Chunxi Li

For many machine learning algorithms such as $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$-NN) classifiers and $ k $-means clustering, often their success heavily depends on the metric used to calculate distances between different data points. An effective…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2010-03-03 Chunhua Shen , Junae Kim , Lei Wang

We propose a new method for the calculation of the statistical properties, as e.g. the entropy, of unknown generators of symbolic sequences. The probability distribution p(k) of the elements k of a population can be approximated by the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-24 Thorsten Poeschel , Werner Ebeling , Helge Rose