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We study the problem of discrete distribution testing in the two-party setting. For example, in the standard closeness testing problem, Alice and Bob each have $t$ samples from, respectively, distributions $a$ and $b$ over $[n]$, and they…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-12 Alexandr Andoni , Tal Malkin , Negev Shekel Nosatzki

We study the problem of learning mixtures of linear classifiers under Gaussian covariates. Given sample access to a mixture of $r$ distributions on $\mathbb{R}^n$ of the form $(\mathbf{x},y_{\ell})$, $\ell\in [r]$, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Yuxin Sun

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

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are popular probabilistic models of diversity. In this paper, we investigate DPPs from a new perspective: property testing of distributions. Given sample access to an unknown distribution $q$ over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Khashayar Gatmiry , Maryam Aliakbarpour , Stefanie Jegelka

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

Hypothesis testing plays a central role in statistical inference, and is used in many settings where privacy concerns are paramount. This work answers a basic question about privately testing simple hypotheses: given two distributions $P$…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Clément L. Canonne , Gautam Kamath , Audra McMillan , Adam Smith , Jonathan Ullman

This paper studies the complexity of estimating Renyi divergences of discrete distributions: $p$ observed from samples and the baseline distribution $q$ known \emph{a priori}. Extending the results of Acharya et al. (SODA'15) on estimating…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-02-09 Maciej Skorski

Independence testing is a fundamental problem in statistical inference: given samples from a joint distribution $p$ over multiple random variables, the goal is to determine whether $p$ is a product distribution or is $\epsilon$-far from all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-06 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Alireza Azizi , Ria Stevens

The sample complexity of simple binary hypothesis testing is the smallest number of i.i.d.\ samples required to distinguish between two distributions $p$ and $q$ in either: (i) the prior-free setting, with type-I error at most $\alpha$ and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Ankit Pensia , Varun Jog , Po-Ling Loh

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 investigate the problems of identity and closeness testing over a discrete population from random samples. Our goal is to develop efficient testers while guaranteeing Differential Privacy to the individuals of the population. We describe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-19 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Ilias Diakonikolas , Ronitt Rubinfeld

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

There has been considerable recent interest in distribution-tests whose run-time and sample requirements are sublinear in the domain-size $k$. We study two of the most important tests under the conditional-sampling model where each query…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-04-17 Moein Falahatgar , Ashkan Jafarpour , Alon Orlitsky , Venkatadheeraj Pichapathi , Ananda Theertha Suresh

Estimating the density of a distribution from its samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. Hypothesis selection addresses the setting where, in addition to a sample set, we are given $n$ candidate distributions -- referred to as…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Zhan Shi , Ria Stevens , Vincent X. Wang

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

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

Motivated by the fact that input distributions are often unknown in advance, distribution-free property testing considers a setting where the algorithmic task is to accept functions $f : [n] \to \{0,1\}$ with a certain property P and reject…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Hugo Aaronson , Tom Gur , Ninad Rajgopal , Ron D. Rothblum

In this work, we give efficient algorithms for privately estimating a Gaussian distribution in both pure and approximate differential privacy (DP) models with optimal dependence on the dimension in the sample complexity. In the pure DP…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Daniel Alabi , Pravesh K. Kothari , Pranay Tankala , Prayaag Venkat , Fred Zhang

We present a new distributed model of probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP). A satisfying assignment $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ to a CNF formula $\varphi$ is shared between two parties, where Alice knows $x_1, \dots, x_{n/2}$, Bob knows…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Amir Abboud , Aviad Rubinstein , Ryan Williams

A common way to discretize a probability measure is to use an empirical measure as a discrete approximation. But how far from being optimal is this approximation in the p-Wasserstein distance? In this paper, we study this question in two…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-08-05 March T. Boedihardjo