Related papers: Optimal query complexity for estimating the trace …
We consider the problem of identifying the subset $\mathcal{S}^{\gamma}_{\mathcal{P}}$ of elements in the support of an underlying distribution $\mathcal{P}$ whose probability value is larger than a given threshold $\gamma$, by actively…
Let X = (x_0,...,x_{n-1})$ be a sequence of n numbers. For \epsilon > 0, we say that x_i is an \epsilon-approximate median if the number of elements strictly less than x_i, and the number of elements strictly greater than x_i are each less…
We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…
We study the problem of estimating the trace of a matrix $A$ that can only be accessed through matrix-vector multiplication. We introduce a new randomized algorithm, Hutch++, which computes a $(1 \pm \epsilon)$ approximation to $tr(A)$ for…
We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
The task of estimating a matrix given a sample of observed entries is known as the \emph{matrix completion problem}. Most works on matrix completion have focused on recovering an unknown real-valued low-rank matrix from a random sample of…
Gradient-based solvers risk convergence to local optima, leading to incorrect researcher inference. Heuristic-based algorithms are able to ``break free" of these local optima to eventually converge to the true global optimum. However, given…
We consider the problem of approximating the product of $n$ expectations with respect to a common probability distribution $\mu$. Such products routinely arise in statistics as values of the likelihood in latent variable models. Motivated…
Efficiently counting or detecting defective items is a crucial task in various fields ranging from biological testing to quality control to streaming algorithms. The \emph{group testing estimation problem} concerns estimating the number of…
The implicit trace estimation problem asks for an approximation of the trace of a square matrix, accessed via matrix-vector products (matvecs). This paper designs new randomized algorithms, XTrace and XNysTrace, for the trace estimation…
This paper studies two potential modifications of XTrace (Epperly et al., SIMAX 45(1):1-23, 2024), a randomized algorithm for estimating the trace of a matrix. The first is a variance reduction step that averages the output of XTrace over…
To fast approximate maximum likelihood estimators with massive data, this paper studies the Optimal Subsampling Method under the A-optimality Criterion (OSMAC) for generalized linear models. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the…
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed mean estimation with 1-bit communication constraints. We propose a mean estimator that is based on (randomized and sequentially-chosen) interval queries, whose 1-bit outcome indicates…
We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…
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…
Consider a regression problem where the learner is given a large collection of $d$-dimensional data points, but can only query a small subset of the real-valued labels. How many queries are needed to obtain a $1+\epsilon$ relative error…
We consider the problem of recovering an unknown matching between a set of $n$ randomly placed points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and random perturbations of these points. This can be seen as a model for particle tracking and more generally, entity…
We propose the first near-optimal quantum algorithm for estimating in Euclidean norm the mean of a vector-valued random variable with finite mean and covariance. Our result aims at extending the theory of multivariate sub-Gaussian…