Related papers: The Sparse Hausdorff Moment Problem, with Applicat…
Noisy $k$-XOR is a basic average-case inference problem in which one observes random noisy $k$-ary parity constraints and seeks to recover, or more weakly, detect, a hidden Boolean assignment. A central question is to characterize the…
We present a new algorithm for identifying the transition and emission probabilities of a hidden Markov model (HMM) from the emitted data. Expectation-maximization becomes computationally prohibitive for long observation records, which are…
We consider the quickest change detection problem where both the parameters of pre- and post- change distributions are unknown, which prevents the use of classical simple hypothesis testing. Without additional assumptions, optimal solutions…
We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a Gaussian or binary distribution in such a way that the resulting undirected graphical model is sparse. Our approach is to solve a maximum likelihood problem with an added l_1-norm…
We study an inverse problem that consists in estimating the first (zero-order) moment of some R2-valued distribution m supported within a closed interval S $\subset$ R, from partial knowledge of the solution to the Poisson-Laplace partial…
Suppose $k$ centers are fit to $m$ points by heuristically minimizing the $k$-means cost; what is the corresponding fit over the source distribution? This question is resolved here for distributions with $p\geq 4$ bounded moments; in…
We consider the following basic inference problem: there is an unknown high-dimensional vector $w \in \mathbb{R}^n$, and an algorithm is given access to labeled pairs $(x,y)$ where $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is a measurement and $y = w \cdot x +…
We consider the problem of closeness testing for two discrete distributions in the practically relevant setting of \emph{unequal} sized samples drawn from each of them. Specifically, given a target error parameter $\varepsilon > 0$, $m_1$…
The Method of Moments [Pea94] is one of the most widely used methods in statistics for parameter estimation, by means of solving the system of equations that match the population and estimated moments. However, in practice and especially…
We study the multivariate nonparametric change point detection problem, where the data are a sequence of independent $p$-dimensional random vectors whose distributions are piecewise-constant with Lipschitz densities changing at unknown…
We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is…
Mixture models are a fundamental tool in applied statistics and machine learning for treating data taken from multiple subpopulations. The current practice for estimating the parameters of such models relies on local search heuristics…
We consider the problem of learning a discrete distribution in the presence of an $\epsilon$ fraction of malicious data sources. Specifically, we consider the setting where there is some underlying distribution, $p$, and each data source…
We study the problem of hypothesis testing between two discrete distributions, where we only have access to samples after the action of a known reversible Markov chain, playing the role of noise. We derive instance-dependent minimax rates…
The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence…
Computing the distribution of permanents of random matrices has been an outstanding open problem for several decades. In quantum computing, "anti-concentration" of this distribution is an unproven input for the proof of hardness of the task…
We consider the problem of finding the minimum element in a list of length $N$ using a noisy comparator. The noise is modelled as follows: given two elements to compare, if the values of the elements differ by at least $\alpha$ by some…
We initiate the study of trade-offs between sparsity and the number of measurements in sparse recovery schemes for generic norms. Specifically, for a norm $\|\cdot\|$, sparsity parameter $k$, approximation factor $K>0$, and probability of…
We give highly efficient algorithms, and almost matching lower bounds, for a range of basic statistical problems that involve testing and estimating the L_1 distance between two k-modal distributions $p$ and $q$ over the discrete domain…
We define the min-min expectation selection problem (resp. max-min expectation selection problem) to be that of selecting k out of n given discrete probability distributions, to minimize (resp. maximize) the expectation of the minimum value…