Related papers: Data Amplification: A Unified and Competitive Appr…
The best-known and most commonly used distribution-property estimation technique uses a plug-in estimator, with empirical frequency replacing the underlying distribution. We present novel linear-time-computable estimators that significantly…
We consider the fundamental learning problem of estimating properties of distributions over large domains. Using a novel piecewise-polynomial approximation technique, we derive the first unified methodology for constructing sample- and…
The advent of data science has spurred interest in estimating properties of distributions over large alphabets. Fundamental symmetric properties such as support size, support coverage, entropy, and proximity to uniformity, received most…
We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions. In the standard model, where we have sample access to an underlying distribution $p$, extensive research has established optimal bounds for uniformity testing,…
In many situations, sample data is obtained from a noisy or imperfect source. In order to address such corruptions, this paper introduces the concept of a sampling corrector. Such algorithms use structure that the distribution is purported…
Recent years have witnessed the success of adaptive (or unified) approaches in estimating symmetric properties of discrete distributions, where one first obtains a distribution estimator independent of the target property, and then plugs…
In this paper we provide a general framework for estimating symmetric properties of distributions from i.i.d. samples. For a broad class of symmetric properties we identify the easy region where empirical estimation works and the difficult…
Distribution testing deals with what information can be deduced about an unknown distribution over $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, where the algorithm is only allowed to obtain a relatively small number of independent samples from the distribution. In…
We propose a new setting for testing properties of distributions while receiving samples from several distributions, but few samples per distribution. Given samples from $s$ distributions, $p_1, p_2, \ldots, p_s$, we design testers for the…
This paper introduces a new property of estimators of the strength of statistical association, which helps characterize how well an estimator will perform in scenarios where dependencies between continuous and discrete random variables need…
The performance of a machine learning system is usually evaluated by using i.i.d.\ observations with true labels. However, acquiring ground truth labels is expensive, while obtaining unlabeled samples may be cheaper. Stratified sampling can…
As statistical analyses become more central to science, industry and society, there is a growing need to ensure correctness of their results. Approximate correctness can be verified by replicating the entire analysis, but can we verify…
Understanding unsupervised domain adaptation has been an important task that has been well explored. However, the wide variety of methods have not analyzed the role of a classifier's performance in detail. In this paper, we thoroughly…
Distributed statistical inference has recently attracted enormous attention. Many existing work focuses on the averaging estimator. We propose a one-step approach to enhance a simple-averaging based distributed estimator. We derive the…
We study the question of existence and fast computation of fair and efficient allocations of indivisible resources among agents with additive valuations. As such allocations may not exist for arbitrary instances, we ask if they exist for…
Property elicitation studies which attributes of a probability distribution can be determined by minimizing a risk. We investigate a generalization of property elicitation to imprecise probabilities (IP). This investigation is motivated by…
The ``sample amplification'' problem formalizes the following question: Given $n$ i.i.d. samples drawn from an unknown distribution $P$, when is it possible to produce a larger set of $n+m$ samples which cannot be distinguished from $n+m$…
Designing scalable estimation algorithms is a core challenge in modern statistics. Here we introduce a framework to address this challenge based on parallel approximants, which yields estimators with provable properties that operate on the…
We study three fundamental statistical-learning problems: distribution estimation, property estimation, and property testing. We establish the profile maximum likelihood (PML) estimator as the first unified sample-optimal approach to a wide…
In some estimation problems, especially in applications dealing with information theory, signal processing and biology, theory provides us with additional information allowing us to restrict the parameter space to a finite number of points.…