English
Related papers

Related papers: Testing $k$-Modal Distributions: Optimal Algorithm…

200 papers

We initiate the study of hypothesis selection under local differential privacy. Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $p$ and a set of $k$ probability distributions $\mathcal{Q}$, we aim to output, under the constraints of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sivakanth Gopi , Gautam Kamath , Janardhan Kulkarni , Aleksandar Nikolov , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Huanyu Zhang

We study the problem of testing identity against a given distribution with a focus on the high confidence regime. More precisely, given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ over $n$ elements, an explicitly given distribution $q$, and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-01-17 Ilias Diakonikolas , Themis Gouleakis , John Peebles , Eric Price

Samplers are the backbone of the implementations of any randomised algorithm. Unfortunately, obtaining an efficient algorithm to test the correctness of samplers is very hard to find. Recently, in a series of works, testers like…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rishiraj Bhattacharyya , Sourav Chakraborty , Yash Pote , Uddalok Sarkar , Sayantan Sen

We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ symbols, given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution. We are interested in minimizing the KL divergence between the true distribution and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-30 Jiayuan Ye , Vitaly Feldman , Kunal Talwar

We initiate a systematic investigation of distribution testing in the framework of algorithmic replicability. Specifically, given independent samples from a collection of probability distributions, the goal is to characterize the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Ilias Diakonikolas , Jingyi Gao , Daniel Kane , Sihan Liu , Christopher Ye

We study the problem of testing whether an unknown $n$-variable Boolean function is a $k$-junta in the distribution-free property testing model, where the distance between functions is measured with respect to an arbitrary and unknown…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Xi Chen , Zhengyang Liu , Rocco A. Servedio , Ying Sheng , Jinyu Xie

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

We study distribution-free property testing and learning problems where the unknown probability distribution is a product distribution over $\mathbb{R}^d$. For many important classes of functions, such as intersections of halfspaces,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Nathaniel Harms , Yuichi Yoshida

We study the {\em robust proper learning} of univariate log-concave distributions (over continuous and discrete domains). Given a set of samples drawn from an unknown target distribution, we want to compute a log-concave hypothesis…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

In this paper, we consider the problem of testing properties of joint distributions under the Conditional Sampling framework. In the standard sampling model, the sample complexity of testing properties of joint distributions is exponential…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Rishiraj Bhattacharyya , Sourav Chakraborty

We provide improved differentially private algorithms for identity testing of high-dimensional distributions. Specifically, for $d$-dimensional Gaussian distributions with known covariance $\Sigma$, we can test whether the distribution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Shyam Narayanan

The $K$-nearest neighbors is a basic problem in machine learning with numerous applications. In this problem, given a (training) set of $n$ data points with labels and a query point $p$, we want to assign a label to $p$ based on the labels…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Reza Fathi , Anisur Rahaman Molla , Gopal Pandurangan

We study the density estimation problem defined as follows: given $k$ distributions $p_1, \ldots, p_k$ over a discrete domain $[n]$, as well as a collection of samples chosen from a ``query'' distribution $q$ over $[n]$, output $p_i$ that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Anders Aamand , Alexandr Andoni , Justin Y. Chen , Piotr Indyk , Shyam Narayanan , Sandeep Silwal , Haike Xu

One of the most fundamental problems in distribution testing is the identity testing problem: given samples $x_1,\ldots,x_s$, the goal is to determine whether the samples are drawn from a target distribution $\mathcal{D}$. When…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-15 Bruno Cavalar , Eli Goldin , Matthew Gray , Taiga Hiroka , Min-Hsiu Hsieh , Tomoyuki Morimae

We study the fundamental problems of identity testing (goodness of fit), and closeness testing (two sample test) of distributions over $k$ elements, under differential privacy. While the problems have a long history in statistics, finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Jayadev Acharya , Ziteng Sun , Huanyu Zhang

We study distribution testing without direct access to a source of relevant data, but rather to one where only a tiny fraction is relevant. To enable this, we introduce the following verification query model. The goal is to perform a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hadley Black , Christopher Ye

We investigate the statistical task of closeness (or equivalence) testing for multidimensional distributions. Specifically, given sample access to two unknown distributions $\mathbf p, \mathbf q$ on $\mathbb R^d$, we want to distinguish…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Sihan Liu

Many machine learning tasks, such as learning with invariance and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, can be characterized as problems of learning from conditional distributions. In such problems, each sample $x$ itself is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-03 Bo Dai , Niao He , Yunpeng Pan , Byron Boots , Le Song

In many problems in data mining and machine learning, data items that need to be clustered or classified are not points in a high-dimensional space, but are distributions (points on a high dimensional simplex). For distributions, natural…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2007-07-13 Sudipto Guha , Andrew McGregor , Suresh Venkatasubramanian

We consider the identity testing problem - or goodness-of-fit testing problem - in multivariate binomial families, multivariate Poisson families and multinomial distributions. Given a known distribution $p$ and $n$ iid samples drawn from an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-04-26 J. Chhor , A. Carpentier