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Related papers: How Hard Is Robust Mean Estimation?

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We consider the problem of mean estimation under quantization and adversarial corruption. We construct multivariate robust estimators that are optimal up to logarithmic factors in two different settings. The first is a one-bit setting,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-13 Pedro Abdalla , Junren Chen

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

We study the fundamental problems of Gaussian mean estimation and linear regression with Gaussian covariates in the presence of Huber contamination. Our main contribution is the design of the first sample near-optimal and almost linear-time…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Ankit Pensia , Thanasis Pittas

We study the robust mean estimation problem in high dimensions, where $\alpha <0.5$ fraction of the data points can be arbitrarily corrupted. Motivated by compressive sensing, we formulate the robust mean estimation problem as the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-24 Jing Liu , Aditya Deshmukh , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

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

Many randomized approximation algorithms operate by giving a procedure for simulating a random variable $X$ which has mean $\mu$ equal to the target answer, and a relative standard deviation bounded above by a known constant $c$. Examples…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-16 Mark Huber

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 the fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a $d$-dimensional distribution with covariance $\Sigma \preccurlyeq \sigma^2 I_d$ given $n$ samples. When $d = 1$, \cite{catoni} showed an estimator with error $(1+o(1)) \cdot…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-20 Shivam Gupta , Samuel B. Hopkins , Eric Price

We study Gaussian sparse estimation tasks in Huber's contamination model with a focus on mean estimation, PCA, and linear regression. For each of these tasks, we give the first sample and computationally efficient robust estimators with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Sushrut Karmalkar , Ankit Pensia , Thanasis Pittas

We give the first polynomial-time algorithm for performing linear or polynomial regression resilient to adversarial corruptions in both examples and labels. Given a sufficiently large (polynomial-size) training set drawn i.i.d. from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Adam Klivans , Pravesh K. Kothari , Raghu Meka

We study the problem of estimating the mean of a distribution in high dimensions when either the samples are adversarially corrupted or the distribution is heavy-tailed. Recent developments in robust statistics have established efficient…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li , Fred Zhang

In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying a linear map from measurements which are subject to intermittent and arbitarily large errors. This is a fundamental problem in many estimation-related applications such as fault…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-08-09 Laurent Bako , Henrik Ohlsson

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

We study efficient algorithms for linear regression and covariance estimation in the absence of Gaussian assumptions on the underlying distributions of samples, making assumptions instead about only finitely-many moments. We focus on how…

We give a polynomial-time algorithm for the problem of robustly estimating a mixture of $k$ arbitrary Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for any fixed $k$, in the presence of a constant fraction of arbitrary corruptions. This resolves the main…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Ainesh Bakshi , Ilias Diakonikolas , He Jia , Daniel M. Kane , Pravesh K. Kothari , Santosh S. Vempala

Real data are rarely pure. Hence the past half-century has seen great interest in robust estimation algorithms that perform well even when part of the data is corrupt. However, their vast majority approach optimal accuracy only when given a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Ayush Jain , Alon Orlitsky , Vaishakh Ravindrakumar

Traditionally, robust statistics has focused on designing estimators tolerant to a minority of contaminated data. Robust list-decodable learning focuses on the more challenging regime where only a minority $\frac 1 k$ fraction of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Daniel Kongsgaard , Jerry Li , Kevin Tian

The goal of this paper is to show that a single robust estimator of the mean of a multivariate Gaussian distribution can enjoy five desirable properties. First, it is computationally tractable in the sense that it can be computed in a time…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Arnak S. Dalalyan , Arshak Minasyan

In statistical learning and analysis from shared data, which is increasingly widely adopted in platforms such as federated learning and meta-learning, there are two major concerns: privacy and robustness. Each participating individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Xiyang Liu , Weihao Kong , Sham Kakade , Sewoong Oh

We study robust mean estimation in an online and distributed scenario in the presence of adversarial data attacks. At each time step, each agent in a network receives a potentially corrupted data point, where the data points were originally…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Tong Yao , Shreyas Sundaram