Related papers: Optimal Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Testing Cl…
Two-sample hypothesis testing-determining whether two sets of data are drawn from the same distribution-is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning with broad scientific applications. In the context of nonparametric testing,…
We give an algorithm for learning a mixture of {\em unstructured} distributions. This problem arises in various unsupervised learning scenarios, for example in learning {\em topic models} from a corpus of documents spanning several topics.…
The objective of goodness-of-fit testing is to assess whether a dataset of observations is likely to have been drawn from a candidate probability distribution. This paper presents a rank-based family of goodness-of-fit tests that is…
We provide improved differentially private algorithms for identity testing of high-dimensional distributions. Specifically, for $d$-dimensional Gaussian distributions with known covariance $\Sigma$, we can test whether the distribution…
We consider the problem of identifying, from statistics, a distribution of discrete random variables $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ that is a mixture of $k$ product distributions. The best previous sample complexity for $n \in O(k)$ was $(1/\zeta)^{O(k^2…
We consider the situation when a learner faces a set of unknown discrete distributions $(p_k)_{k\in \mathcal K}$ defined over a common alphabet $\mathcal X$, and can build for each distribution $p_k$ an individual high-probability…
We study the problems of identity and closeness testing of $n$-dimensional product distributions. Prior works by Canonne, Diakonikolas, Kane and Stewart (COLT 2017) and Daskalakis and Pan (COLT 2017) have established tight sample complexity…
Finite precision approximations of discrete probability distributions are considered, applicable for distribution synthesis, e.g., probabilistic shaping. Two algorithms are presented that find the optimal $M$-type approximation $Q$ of a…
Probabilistic k-nearest neighbour (PKNN) classification has been introduced to improve the performance of original k-nearest neighbour (KNN) classification algorithm by explicitly modelling uncertainty in the classification of each feature…
We are interested in testing properties of distributions with systematically mislabeled samples. Our goal is to make decisions about unknown probability distributions, using a sample that has been collected by a confused collector, such as…
This paper studies the problem of estimation from relative measurements in a graph, in which a vector indexed over the nodes has to be reconstructed from pairwise measurements of differences between its components associated to nodes…
We propose a novel kernel-based nonparametric two-sample test, employing the combined use of kernel mean and kernel covariance embedding. Our test builds on recent results showing how such combined embeddings map distinct probability…
We consider the problem of spherical Gaussian Mixture models with $k \geq 3$ components when the components are well separated. A fundamental previous result established that separation of $\Omega(\sqrt{\log k})$ is necessary and sufficient…
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…
In this paper, we advocate a novel measure for the purpose of checking the quality of a cluster partition for a sample into several distinct classes, and thus, determine the unknown value for the true number of clusters prevailing the…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used method for maximum likelihood estimation in models with latent variables. For estimating mixtures of Gaussians, its iteration can be viewed as a soft version of the k-means…
Sequence classification algorithms, such as SVM, require a definition of distance (similarity) measure between two sequences. A commonly used notion of similarity is the number of matches between $k$-mers ($k$-length subsequences) in the…
Distribution testing deals with what information can be deduced about an unknown distribution over $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, where the algorithm is only allowed to obtain a relatively small number of independent samples from the distribution. In…
We consider a class of hypothesis testing problems where the null hypothesis postulates $M$ distributions for the observed data, and there is only one possible distribution under the alternative. We show that one can use a stochastic mirror…
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 $P$…