Related papers: Properly Learning Poisson Binomial Distributions i…

The negative binomial distribution has been widely used as a more flexible model than the Poisson distribution for count data. However, when the true data-generating process is Poisson, it is often challenging to distinguish it from a…

Many applications, including natural language processing, sensor networks, collaborative filtering, and federated learning, call for estimating discrete distributions from data collected in batches, some of which may be untrustworthy,…

An $(n,k)$-Poisson Multinomial Distribution (PMD) is the distribution of the sum of $n$ independent random vectors supported on the set ${\cal B}_k=\{e_1,\ldots,e_k\}$ of standard basis vectors in $\mathbb{R}^k$. We show that any…

We study the efficient learnability of high-dimensional Gaussian mixtures in the outlier-robust setting, where a small constant fraction of the data is adversarially corrupted. We resolve the polynomial learnability of this problem when the…

A $k$-modal probability distribution over the discrete domain $\{1,...,n\}$ is one whose histogram has at most $k$ "peaks" and "valleys." Such distributions are natural generalizations of monotone ($k=0$) and unimodal ($k=1$) probability…

Distance measures are part and parcel of many computer vision algorithms. The underlying assumption in all existing distance measures is that feature elements are independent and identically distributed. However, in real-world settings,…

We show how to compute any symmetric Boolean function on $n$ variables over any field (as well as the integers) with a probabilistic polynomial of degree $O(\sqrt{n \log(1/\epsilon)})$ and error at most $\epsilon$. The degree dependence on…

The authors recently gave an $n^{O(\log\log n)}$ time membership query algorithm for properly learning decision trees under the uniform distribution (Blanc et al., 2021). The previous fastest algorithm for this problem ran in $n^{O(\log…

We consider Poisson's equation for quasi-birth-and-death processes (QBDs) and we exploit the special transition structure of QBDs to obtain its solutions in two different forms. One is based on a decomposition through first passage times to…

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.…

We study the fundamental problem of high-dimensional mean estimation in a robust model where a constant fraction of the samples are adversarially corrupted. Recent work gave the first polynomial time algorithms for this problem with…

Let $X_1,X_2,...,X_n$ be a sequence of independent or locally dependent random variables taking values in $\mathbb{Z}_+$. In this paper, we derive sharp bounds, via a new probabilistic method, for the total variation distance between the…

We revisit the problem of distribution learning within the framework of learning-augmented algorithms. In this setting, we explore the scenario where a probability distribution is provided as potentially inaccurate advice on the true,…

We present a fairly general framework for reducing $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ differentially private (DP) statistical estimation to its non-private counterpart. As the main application of this framework, we give a polynomial time and…

We introduce the Poisson Binomial mechanism (PBM), a discrete differential privacy mechanism for distributed mean estimation (DME) with applications to federated learning and analytics. We provide a tight analysis of its privacy guarantees,…

Polynomial regression is a basic primitive in learning and statistics. In its most basic form the goal is to fit a degree $d$ polynomial to a response variable $y$ in terms of an $n$-dimensional input vector $x$. This is extremely…

Counting experiments often rely on Monte Carlo simulations for predictions of Poisson expectations. The accompanying uncertainty from the finite Monte Carlo sample size can be incorporated into parameter estimation by modifying the Poisson…

The problem of learning a computational model from examples has been receiving growing attention. For the particularly challenging problem of learning models of distributed systems, existing results are restricted to models with a fixed…

We examine a generalization of the binomial distribution associated with a strictly increasing sequence of numbers and we prove its Poisson-like limit. Such generalizations might be found in quantum optics with imperfect detection. We…

We present the first $\varepsilon$-differentially private, computationally efficient algorithm that estimates the means of product distributions over $\{0,1\}^d$ accurately in total-variation distance, whilst attaining the optimal sample…