Related papers: Optimal Algorithms for Testing Closeness of Discre…
We study the problem of generalized uniformity testing \cite{BC17} of a discrete probability distribution: Given samples from a probability distribution $p$ over an {\em unknown} discrete domain $\mathbf{\Omega}$, we want to distinguish,…
In this work, we give a novel general approach for distribution testing. We describe two techniques: our first technique gives sample-optimal testers, while our second technique gives matching sample lower bounds. As a consequence, we…
We study the impact of quantum computation on the fundamental problem of testing the property of distributions. In particular, we focus on testing whether two unknown classical distributions are close or far enough, and propose the…
We give highly efficient algorithms, and almost matching lower bounds, for a range of basic statistical problems that involve testing and estimating the L_1 distance between two k-modal distributions $p$ and $q$ over the discrete domain…
We study simple binary hypothesis testing under both local differential privacy (LDP) and communication constraints. We qualify our results as either minimax optimal or instance optimal: the former hold for the set of distribution pairs…
What advantage do \emph{sequential} procedures provide over batch algorithms for testing properties of unknown distributions? Focusing on the problem of testing whether two distributions $\mathcal{D}_1$ and $\mathcal{D}_2$ on $\{1,\dots,…
We study the fundamental problems of (i) uniformity testing of a discrete distribution, and (ii) closeness testing between two discrete distributions with bounded $\ell_2$-norm. These problems have been extensively studied in distribution…
We introduce and study the computational problem of determining statistical similarity between probability distributions. For distributions $P$ and $Q$ over a finite sample space, their statistical similarity is defined as…
In the "correlated sampling" problem, two players are given probability distributions $P$ and $Q$, respectively, over the same finite set, with access to shared randomness. Without any communication, the two players are each required to…
We consider the problem of estimating the $L_1$ distance between two discrete probability measures $P$ and $Q$ from empirical data in a nonasymptotic and large alphabet setting. When $Q$ is known and one obtains $n$ samples from $P$, we…
Suppose one has access to oracles generating samples from two unknown probability distributions P and Q on some N-element set. How many samples does one need to test whether the two distributions are close or far from each other in the…
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…
We revisit the problem of tolerant distribution testing. That is, given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ over $\{1, \dots, n\}$, is it $\varepsilon_1$-close to or $\varepsilon_2$-far from a reference distribution $q$ (in total…
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…
We consider the problem of learning a discrete distribution in the presence of an $\epsilon$ fraction of malicious data sources. Specifically, we consider the setting where there is some underlying distribution, $p$, and each data source…
A Poisson Binomial distribution over $n$ variables is the distribution of the sum of $n$ independent Bernoullis. We provide a sample near-optimal algorithm for testing whether a distribution $P$ supported on $\{0,...,n\}$ to which we have…
Hypothesis Selection is a fundamental distribution learning problem where given a comparator-class $Q=\{q_1,\ldots, q_n\}$ of distributions, and a sampling access to an unknown target distribution $p$, the goal is to output a distribution…
Let $\mathbf{X} = (X_i)_{1\leq i \leq n}$ be an i.i.d. sample of square-integrable variables in $\mathbb{R}^d$, \GB{with common expectation $\mu$ and covariance matrix $\Sigma$, both unknown.} We consider the problem of testing if $\mu$ is…
Private closeness testing asks to decide whether the underlying probability distributions of two sensitive datasets are identical or differ significantly in statistical distance, while guaranteeing (differential) privacy of the data. As in…
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…