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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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-11-14 Ilias Diakonikolas , Themis Gouleakis , John Peebles , Eric Price

We investigate the problem of identity testing for multidimensional histogram distributions. A distribution $p: D \rightarrow \mathbb{R}_+$, where $D \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$, is called a $k$-histogram if there exists a partition of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-02-20 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , John Peebles

We study the problem, introduced by Qiao and Valiant, of learning from untrusted batches. Here, we assume $m$ users, all of whom have samples from some underlying distribution $p$ over $1, \ldots, n$. Each user sends a batch of $k$ i.i.d.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Sitan Chen , Jerry Li , Ankur Moitra

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Mingda Qiao , Gregory Valiant

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

Given samples from two distributions over an $n$-element set, we wish to test whether these distributions are statistically close. We present an algorithm which uses sublinear in $n$, specifically, $O(n^{2/3}\epsilon^{-8/3}\log n)$,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-11-05 Tugkan Batu , Lance Fortnow , Ronitt Rubinfeld , Warren D. Smith , Patrick White

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

There has been significant study on the sample complexity of testing properties of distributions over large domains. For many properties, it is known that the sample complexity can be substantially smaller than the domain size. For example,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-07-09 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Ravi Kumar , Ronitt Rubinfeld

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

We study quantum algorithms for verifying properties of the output probability distribution of a classical or quantum circuit, given access to the source code that generates the distribution. We consider the basic task of uniformity…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-11-08 Clément L. Canonne , Robin Kothari , Ryan O'Donnell

Learning a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is a fundamental problem in machine learning, learning theory, and statistics. One notion of learning a GMM is proper learning: here, the goal is to find a mixture of $k$ Gaussians $\mathcal{M}$ that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-06-04 Jerry Li , Ludwig Schmidt

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 consider the problem of allocating samples to a finite set of discrete distributions in order to learn them uniformly well in terms of four common distance measures: $\ell_2^2$, $\ell_1$, $f$-divergence, and separation distance. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-10 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Tara Javidi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-05-10 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane

Uniformity testing is arguably one of the most fundamental distribution testing problems. Given sample access to an unknown distribution $\mathbf{p}$ on $[n]$, one must decide if $\mathbf{p}$ is uniform or $\varepsilon$-far from uniform (in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Sihan Liu , Christopher Ye

We design efficient distance approximation algorithms for several classes of structured high-dimensional distributions. Specifically, we show algorithms for the following problems: - Given sample access to two Bayesian networks $P_1$ and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Sutanu Gayen , Kuldeep S. Meel , N. V. Vinodchandran

We study the general problem of testing whether an unknown distribution belongs to a specified family of distributions. More specifically, given a distribution family $\mathcal{P}$ and sample access to an unknown discrete distribution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-08-09 Clément L. Canonne , Ilias Diakonikolas , Alistair Stewart

We investigate Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), a partial information setting where examples in a training set are grouped into bags, and only aggregate label values in each bag are available. Despite the partial observability, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Robert Busa-Fekete , Travis Dick , Claudio Gentile , Haim Kaplan , Tomer Koren , Uri Stemmer

We present new algorithms for estimating and testing \emph{collision probability}, a fundamental measure of the spread of a discrete distribution that is widely used in many scientific fields. We describe an algorithm that satisfies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Robert Busa-Fekete , Umar Syed