English
Related papers

Related papers: High-Dimensional Robust Mean Estimation in Nearly-…

200 papers

We present a fast, differentially private algorithm for high-dimensional covariance-aware mean estimation with nearly optimal sample complexity. Only exponential-time estimators were previously known to achieve this guarantee. Given $n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Gavin Brown , Samuel B. Hopkins , Adam Smith

Learning in the presence of outliers is a fundamental problem in statistics. Until recently, all known efficient unsupervised learning algorithms were very sensitive to outliers in high dimensions. In particular, even for the task of robust…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane

We study high-dimensional sparse estimation tasks in a robust setting where a constant fraction of the dataset is adversarially corrupted. Specifically, we focus on the fundamental problems of robust sparse mean estimation and robust sparse…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Ilias Diakonikolas , Sushrut Karmalkar , Daniel Kane , Eric Price , Alistair Stewart

Learning from data in the presence of outliers is a fundamental problem in statistics. Until recently, no computationally efficient algorithms were known to compute the mean of a high dimensional distribution under natural assumptions in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri , Sidhanth Mohanty , Morris Yau

We study the fundamental task of outlier-robust mean estimation for heavy-tailed distributions in the presence of sparsity. Specifically, given a small number of corrupted samples from a high-dimensional heavy-tailed distribution whose mean…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Jasper C. H. Lee , Ankit Pensia

Robust covariance estimation is the following, well-studied problem in high dimensional statistics: given $N$ samples from a $d$-dimensional Gaussian $\mathcal{N}(\boldsymbol{0}, \Sigma)$, but where an $\varepsilon$-fraction of the samples…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Jerry Li , Guanghao Ye

We study the problem of high-dimensional robust mean estimation in an online setting. Specifically, we consider a scenario where $n$ sensors are measuring some common, ongoing phenomenon. At each time step $t=1,2,\ldots,T$, the $i^{th}$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Daniel M. Kane , Ilias Diakonikolas , Hanshen Xiao , Sihan Liu

We give the first polynomial time and sample $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differentially private (DP) algorithm to estimate the mean, covariance and higher moments in the presence of a constant fraction of adversarial outliers. Our algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-08 Pravesh K. Kothari , Pasin Manurangsi , Ameya Velingker

We study the problem of list-decodable mean estimation, where an adversary can corrupt a majority of the dataset. Specifically, we are given a set $T$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and a parameter $0< \alpha <\frac 1 2$ such that an…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Daniel Kongsgaard , Jerry Li , Kevin Tian

We study the algorithmic problem of robust mean estimation of an identity covariance Gaussian in the presence of mean-shift contamination. In this contamination model, we are given a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ generated i.i.d. via the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Ilias Diakonikolas , Giannis Iakovidis , Daniel M. Kane , Thanasis Pittas

We study the problem of robust mean estimation and introduce a novel Hamming distance-based measure of distribution shift for coordinate-level corruptions. We show that this measure yields adversary models that capture more realistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Zifan Liu , Jongho Park , Theodoros Rekatsinas , Christos Tzamos

Robust mean estimation is one of the most important problems in statistics: given a set of samples in $\mathbb{R}^d$ where an $\alpha$ fraction are drawn from some distribution $D$ and the rest are adversarially corrupted, we aim to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Shiwei Zeng , Jie Shen

We consider high dimensional sparse regression, and develop strategies able to deal with arbitrary -- possibly, severe or coordinated -- errors in the covariance matrix $X$. These may come from corrupted data, persistent experimental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-01-15 Yudong Chen , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

We study the task of high-dimensional entangled mean estimation in the subset-of-signals model. Specifically, given $N$ independent random points $x_1,\ldots,x_N$ in $\mathbb{R}^D$ and a parameter $\alpha \in (0, 1)$ such that each $x_i$ is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Sihan Liu , Thanasis Pittas

We explore why many recently proposed robust estimation problems are efficiently solvable, even though the underlying optimization problems are non-convex. We study the loss landscape of these robust estimation problems, and identify the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-29 Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Jacob Steinhardt

In this paper we initiate the study of whether or not sparse estimation tasks can be performed efficiently in high dimensions, in the robust setting where an $\eps$-fraction of samples are corrupted adversarially. We study the natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Jerry Li

We use the Sum of Squares method to develop new efficient algorithms for learning well-separated mixtures of Gaussians and robust mean estimation, both in high dimensions, that substantially improve upon the statistical guarantees achieved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-06-03 Jayadev Acharya , Ilias Diakonikolas , Jerry Li , Ludwig Schmidt

We investigate the problem of learning Bayesian networks in a robust model where an $\epsilon$-fraction of the samples are adversarially corrupted. In this work, we study the fully observable discrete case where the structure of the network…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Yu Cheng , Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel Kane , Alistair Stewart

We study high-dimensional distribution learning in an agnostic setting where an adversary is allowed to arbitrarily corrupt an $\varepsilon$-fraction of the samples. Such questions have a rich history spanning statistics, machine learning…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-03-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Gautam Kamath , Daniel Kane , Jerry Li , Ankur Moitra , Alistair Stewart