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Related papers: How Hard Is Robust Mean Estimation?

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We study the problem of finding solutions to the stable matching problem that are robust to errors in the input and we obtain a polynomial time algorithm for a special class of errors. In the process, we also initiate work on a new…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-17 Tung Mai , Vijay V. Vazirani

This paper is devoted to the statistical and numerical properties of the geometric median, and its applications to the problem of robust mean estimation via the median of means principle. Our main theoretical results include (a) an upper…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-07-21 Stanislav Minsker , Nate Strawn

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Elita A. Lobo , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

We study statistical inference and distributionally robust solution methods for stochastic optimization problems, focusing on confidence intervals for optimal values and solutions that achieve exact coverage asymptotically. We develop a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-03 John Duchi , Peter Glynn , Hongseok Namkoong

We study the problem of estimating the mean of a random vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ based on an i.i.d.\ sample, when the accuracy of the estimator is measured by a general norm on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We construct an estimator (that depends on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-06-19 Gábor Lugosi , Shahar Mendelson

In today's era of big data, robust least-squares regression becomes a more challenging problem when considering the adversarial corruption along with explosive growth of datasets. Traditional robust methods can handle the noise but suffer…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Xuchao Zhang , Liang Zhao , Arnold P. Boedihardjo , Chang-Tien Lu

Deep learning requires regularization mechanisms to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. We address this problem by a new regularization method based on distributional robust optimization. The key idea is to modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Aurora Cobo Aguilera , Antonio Artés-Rodríguez , Fernando Pérez-Cruz , Pablo Martínez Olmos

In this paper, we study the problem of sparse mean estimation under adversarial corruptions, where the goal is to estimate the $k$-sparse mean of a heavy-tailed distribution from samples contaminated by adversarial noise. Existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jianhao Ma , Rui Ray Chen , Yinghui He , Salar Fattahi , Wei Hu

We study the fundamental task of estimating the median of an underlying distribution from a finite number of samples, under pure differential privacy constraints. We focus on distributions satisfying the minimal assumption that they have a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-13 Christos Tzamos , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis , Ilias Zadik

We consider the problem of sparsity-constrained $M$-estimation when both explanatory and response variables have heavy tails (bounded 4-th moments), or a fraction of arbitrary corruptions. We focus on the $k$-sparse, high-dimensional regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Liu Liu , Tianyang Li , Constantine Caramanis

The problem of linear predictions has been extensively studied for the past century under pretty generalized frameworks. Recent advances in the robust statistics literature allow us to analyze robust versions of classical linear models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-15 Saptarshi Chakraborty , Debolina Paul , Swagatam Das

We propose a robust and scalable procedure for general optimization and inference problems on manifolds leveraging the classical idea of `median-of-means' estimation. This is motivated by ubiquitous examples and applications in modern data…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-16 Lizhen Lin , Drew Lazar , Bayan Sarpabayeva , David B. Dunson

Robust optimization over time (ROOT) refers to an optimization problem where its performance is evaluated over a period of future time. Most of the existing algorithms use particle swarm optimization combined with another method which…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Lukáš Adam , Xin Yao

The state-of-the-art methods for estimating high-dimensional covariance matrices all shrink the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix towards a data-insensitive shrinkage target. The underlying shrinkage transformation is either…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-25 Man-Chung Yue , Yves Rychener , Daniel Kuhn , Viet Anh Nguyen

Structured statistical estimation problems are often solved by Conditional Gradient (CG) type methods to avoid the computationally expensive projection operation. However, the existing CG type methods are not robust to data corruption. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-08 Jiacheng Zhuo , Liu Liu , Constantine Caramanis

We present a sample- and time-efficient differentially private algorithm for ordinary least squares, with error that depends linearly on the dimension and is independent of the condition number of $X^\top X$, where $X$ is the design matrix.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Gavin Brown , Jonathan Hayase , Samuel Hopkins , Weihao Kong , Xiyang Liu , Sewoong Oh , Juan C. Perdomo , Adam Smith

We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-15 Ahmet Alacaoglu , Yura Malitsky , Stephen J. Wright

Median-of-means (MOM) based procedures provide non-asymptotic and strong deviation bounds even when data are heavy-tailed and/or corrupted. This work proposes a new general way to bound the excess risk for MOM estimators. The core technique…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-09 Jules Depersin

This paper addresses the following question: given a sample of i.i.d. random variables with finite variance, can one construct an estimator of the unknown mean that performs nearly as well as if the data were normally distributed? One of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-02-06 Stanislav Minsker

We study the following fundamental hypothesis testing problem, which we term Gaussian mean testing. Given i.i.d. samples from a distribution $p$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, the task is to distinguish, with high probability, between the following…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-26 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Ankit Pensia