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Related papers: Optimal Testing for Properties of Distributions

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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

We study chance constrained optimization problems $\min_x f(x)$ s.t. $P(\left\{ \theta: g(x,\theta)\le 0 \right\})\ge 1-\epsilon$ where $\epsilon\in (0,1)$ is the violation probability, when the distribution $P$ is not known to the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 A Ch Madhusudanarao , Rahul Singh

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

In this paper we propose a nonparametric graphical test based on optimal matching, for assessing the equality of multiple unknown multivariate probability distributions. Our procedure pools the data from the different classes to create a…

We study distributed goodness-of-fit testing for discrete distribution under bandwidth and differential privacy constraints. Information constraint distributed goodness-of-fit testing is a problem that has received considerable attention…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Lasse Vuursteen

The problem of quickest detection of a change in the distribution of a sequence of random variables is studied. The objective is to detect the change with the minimum possible delay, subject to constraints on the rate of false alarms and…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-31 Yingze Hou , Hoda Bidkhori , Taposh Banerjee

Low-dimensional embedding, manifold learning, clustering, classification, and anomaly detection are among the most important problems in machine learning. The existing methods usually consider the case when each instance has a fixed,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Barnabas Poczos , Liang Xiong , Jeff Schneider

Many scientific applications involve testing theories that are only partially specified. This task often amounts to testing the goodness-of-fit of a candidate distribution while allowing for reasonable deviations from it. The tolerant…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Lucas Kania , Tudor Manole , Larry Wasserman , Sivaraman Balakrishnan

We define a novel, basic, unsupervised learning problem - learning the lowest density homogeneous hyperplane separator of an unknown probability distribution. This task is relevant to several problems in machine learning, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-01-22 Shai Ben-David , Tyler Lu , David Pal , Miroslava Sotakova

We study the problem of distinguishing between two symmetric probability distributions over $n$ bits by observing $k$ bits of a sample, subject to the constraint that all $k-1$-wise marginal distributions of the two distributions are…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Christopher Williamson

Given a sequence of samples $x_1, \dots , x_k$ promised to be drawn from one of two distributions $X_0, X_1$, a well-studied problem in statistics is to decide $\textit{which}$ distribution the samples are from. Information theoretically,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Cassandra Marcussen , Aaron Putterman , Salil Vadhan

Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Charles C. Margossian , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Lawrence K. Saul

The problem of quickest detection of a change in distribution is considered under the assumption that the pre-change distribution is known, and the post-change distribution is only known to belong to a family of distributions…

Applications · Statistics 2019-01-30 Tze Siong Lau , Wee Peng Tay , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

We consider the problem of uniformity testing of Lipschitz continuous distributions with bounded support. The alternative hypothesis is a composite set of Lipschitz continuous distributions that are at least $\varepsilon$ away in $\ell_1$…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-10-14 Sudeep Salgia , Qing Zhao , Lang Tong

Stochastic programs where the uncertainty distribution must be inferred from noisy data samples are considered. The stochastic programs are approximated with distributionally-robust optimizations that minimize the worst-case expected cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Farhad Farokhi

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Mohammad Bavarian , Badih Ghazi , Elad Haramaty , Pritish Kamath , Ronald L. Rivest , Madhu Sudan

The problem of quickest detection of a change in the distribution of a $n\times p$ random matrix based on a sequence of observations having a single unknown change point is considered. The forms of the pre- and post-change distributions of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-23 Taposh Banerjee , Hamed Firouzi , Alfred O. Hero

This paper provides a non-robust interpretation of the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem by relating the distributional uncertainties to the chance probabilities. Our analysis allows a decision-maker to interpret the size…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Qi Wu , Shumin Ma , Cheuk Hang Leung , Wei Liu , Nanbo Peng

Motivated by the question of data quantization and "binning," we revisit the problem of identity testing of discrete probability distributions. Identity testing (a.k.a. one-sample testing), a fundamental and by now well-understood problem…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Clément L. Canonne , Karl Wimmer

Testing hypotheses of goodness-of-fit about mixture distributions on the basis of independent but not necessarily identically distributed random vectors is considered. The hypotheses are given by a specific distribution or by a family of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-04-21 Daniel Gaigall