Related papers: Which Distribution Distances are Sublinearly Testa…
Functions of the ratio of the densities $p/q$ are widely used in machine learning to quantify the discrepancy between the two distributions $p$ and $q$. For high-dimensional distributions, binary classification-based density ratio…
Nonparametric two sample or homogeneity testing is a decision theoretic problem that involves identifying differences between two random variables without making parametric assumptions about their underlying distributions. The literature is…
Motivated by real-world machine learning applications, we analyze approximations to the non-asymptotic fundamental limits of statistical classification. In the binary version of this problem, given two training sequences generated according…
Besides the classical distinction of correlation and dependence, many dependence measures bear further pitfalls in their application and interpretation. The aim of this paper is to raise and recall awareness of some of these limitations by…
Distance correlation has gained much recent attention in the data science community: the sample statistic is straightforward to compute and asymptotically equals zero if and only if independence, making it an ideal choice to discover any…
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…
Distance queries are a basic tool in data analysis. They are used for detection and localization of change for the purpose of anomaly detection, monitoring, or planning. Distance queries are particularly useful when data sets such as…
Given a discrete-valued sample $X_1,...,X_n$ we wish to decide whether it was generated by a distribution belonging to a family $H_0$, or it was generated by a distribution belonging to a family $H_1$. In this work we assume that all…
Distance correlation has become an increasingly popular tool for detecting the nonlinear dependence between a pair of potentially high-dimensional random vectors. Most existing works have explored its asymptotic distributions under the null…
We consider Wald's sequential probability ratio test for deciding whether a sequence of independent and identically distributed observations comes from a specified phase-type distribution or from an exponentially tilted alternative…
The Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Kullback-Leibler variation, and the Bernstein "norm" are used to quantify discrepancies among probability distributions in likelihood models such as nonparametric maximum likelihood and nonparametric…
We consider the problem of distinguishing between two arbitrary black-box distributions defined over the domain [n], given access to $s$ samples from both. It is known that in the worst case O(n^{2/3}) samples is both necessary and…
In this paper, we consider the problem of testing properties of joint distributions under the Conditional Sampling framework. In the standard sampling model, the sample complexity of testing properties of joint distributions is exponential…
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…
The $2$-Wasserstein distance is sensitive to minor geometric differences between distributions, making it a very powerful dissimilarity metric. However, due to this sensitivity, a small outlier mass can also cause a significant increase in…
This work establishes computable bounds between f-divergences for probability measures within a generalized quasi-$\varepsilon_{(M,m)}$-neighborhood framework. We make the following key contributions. (1) a unified characterization of local…
The binary divergences that are divergences between probability measures defined on the same 2-point set have an interesting property. For the chi-squared divergence and the relative entropy, it is known that their binary divergence attain…
Let $\mathbf{X} = (X_i)_{1\leq i \leq n}$ be an i.i.d. sample of square-integrable variables in $\mathbb{R}^d$, \GB{with common expectation $\mu$ and covariance matrix $\Sigma$, both unknown.} We consider the problem of testing if $\mu$ is…
Comparing probability distributions is an indispensable and ubiquitous task in machine learning and statistics. The most common way to compare a pair of Borel probability measures is to compute a metric between them, and by far the most…
In the uniformity testing task, an algorithm is provided with samples from an unknown probability distribution over a (known) finite domain, and must decide whether it is the uniform distribution, or, alternatively, if its total variation…