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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

In this work, we revisit the problem of uniformity testing of discrete probability distributions. A fundamental problem in distribution testing, testing uniformity over a known domain has been addressed over a significant line of works, and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-08-17 Tuğkan Batu , Clément L. Canonne

Computing the similarity between two probability distributions is a recurring theme across control. We introduce a unified family of distances between the probability distributions of two random variables that is based on the discrepancy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Alexandros E. Tzikas , Arec Jamgochian , Nazim Kemal Ure , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Stephen P. Boyd

In the statistical literature, as well as in artificial intelligence and machine learning, measures of discrepancy between two probability distributions are largely used to develop measures of goodness-of-fit. We concentrate on quadratic…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-01 Marianthi Markatou , Giovanni Saraceno

We consider the problem of computing L1-distances between every pair ofcprobability densities from a given family. We point out that the technique of Cauchy random projections (Indyk'06) in this context turns into stochastic integrals with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2008-04-09 Satyaki Mahalanabis , Daniel Stefankovic

We study the problem of testing \emph{conditional independence} for discrete distributions. Specifically, given samples from a discrete random variable $(X, Y, Z)$ on domain $[\ell_1]\times[\ell_2] \times [n]$, we want to distinguish, with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Clément L. Canonne , Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

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

Clustering is a classic topic in optimization with $k$-means being one of the most fundamental such problems. In the absence of any restrictions on the input, the best known algorithm for $k$-means with a provable guarantee is a simple…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Sara Ahmadian , Ashkan Norouzi-Fard , Ola Svensson , Justin Ward

Nonparametric tests for equality of multivariate distributions are frequently desired in research. It is commonly required that test-procedures based on relatively small samples of vectors accurately control the corresponding Type I Error…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-14 Ablert Vexler , Gregory Gurevich , Li Zou

Learning a robust classifier from a few samples remains a key challenge in machine learning. A major thrust of research has been focused on developing $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) based algorithms combined with metric learning that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-17 Shixiang Zhu , Liyan Xie , Minghe Zhang , Rui Gao , Yao Xie

We study the fundamental problem of approximate nearest neighbor search in $d$-dimensional Hamming space $\{0,1\}^d$. We study the complexity of the problem in the famous cell-probe model, a classic model for data structures. We consider…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-02-16 Mingmou Liu , Xiaoyin Pan , Yitong Yin

Approximating distributions from their samples is a canonical statistical-learning problem. One of its most powerful and successful modalities approximates every distribution to an $\ell_1$ distance essentially at most a constant times…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-22 Yi Hao , Ayush Jain , Alon Orlitsky , Vaishakh Ravindrakumar

In this paper, we provide the proof of $L^2$ consistency for the $k$th nearest neighbour distance estimator of the Shannon entropy for an arbitrary fixed $k\geq 1.$ We construct the non-parametric test of goodness-of-fit for a class of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-14 Mehmet Siddik Cadirci , Dafydd Evans , Nikolai Leonenko , Vitalii Makogin

We examine the extent to which sublinear-sample property testing and estimation apply to settings where samples are independently but not identically distributed. Specifically, we consider the following distributional property testing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Shivam Garg , Chirag Pabbaraju , Kirankumar Shiragur , Gregory Valiant

A striking result of [Acharya et al. 2017] showed that to estimate symmetric properties of discrete distributions, plugging in the distribution that maximizes the likelihood of observed multiset of frequencies, also known as the profile…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Yanjun Han , Kirankumar Shiragur

Consider the following problem: given two arbitrary densities $q_1,q_2$ and a sample-access to an unknown target density $p$, find which of the $q_i$'s is closer to $p$ in total variation. A remarkable result due to Yatracos shows that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Olivier Bousquet , Daniel Kane , Shay Moran

We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust $Q$-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study statistical/computational tradeoffs for the following density estimation problem: given $k$ distributions $v_1, \ldots, v_k$ over a discrete domain of size $n$, and sampling access to a distribution $p$, identify $v_i$ that is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Anders Aamand , Alexandr Andoni , Justin Y. Chen , Piotr Indyk , Shyam Narayanan , Sandeep Silwal

The $K$-nearest neighbors is a basic problem in machine learning with numerous applications. In this problem, given a (training) set of $n$ data points with labels and a query point $p$, we want to assign a label to $p$ based on the labels…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Reza Fathi , Anisur Rahaman Molla , Gopal Pandurangan

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