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Real-world data is laden with outlying values. The challenge for machine learning is that the learner typically has no prior knowledge of whether the feedback it receives (losses, gradients, etc.) will be heavy-tailed or not. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-16 Matthew J. Holland

We consider the task of heavy-tailed statistical estimation given streaming $p$-dimensional samples. This could also be viewed as stochastic optimization under heavy-tailed distributions, with an additional $O(p)$ space complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Che-Ping Tsai , Adarsh Prasad , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Pradeep Ravikumar

A robust estimator for a wide family of mixtures of linear regression is presented. Robustness is based on the joint adoption of the Cluster Weighted Model and of an estimator based on trimming and restrictions. The selected model provides…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-02-05 L. A. Garcia-Escudero , A. Gordaliza , F. Greselin , S. Ingrassia , A. Mayo-Iscar

This paper gives two theoretical results on estimating low-rank parameter matrices for linear models with multivariate responses. We first focus on robust parameter estimation of low-rank multi-task learning with heavy-tailed data and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-24 Kangqiang Li , Yuxuan Wang

We study high-dimensional mean estimation in a collaborative setting where data is contributed by $N$ users in batches of size $n$. In this environment, a learner seeks to recover the mean $\mu$ of a true distribution $P$ from a collection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Vladimir Braverman , Yuhan Liu , Junze Yin

Under losses which are potentially heavy-tailed, we consider the task of minimizing sums of the loss mean and standard deviation, without trying to accurately estimate the variance. By modifying a technique for variance-free robust mean…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-12 Matthew J. Holland

Heavy-tailed distributions naturally arise in several settings, from finance to telecommunications. While regret minimization under subgaussian or bounded rewards has been widely studied, learning with heavy-tailed distributions only gained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Gianmarco Genalti , Lupo Marsigli , Nicola Gatti , Alberto Maria Metelli

We present an algorithm for distributed estimation of an unknown vector parameter $\boldsymbol{\theta}^\ast \in {\mathbb R}^M$ in the presence of heavy-tailed observation and communication noises. Heavy-tailed noises frequently appear,…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar , Manojlo Vukovic

We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Subhodip Panda , Shubhada Agrawal

The composite quantile regression (CQR) was introduced by Zou and Yuan [Ann. Statist. 36 (2008) 1108--1126] as a robust regression method for linear models with heavy-tailed errors while achieving high efficiency. Its penalized counterpart…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-16 Haeseong Moon , Wen-Xin Zhou

In this paper, we consider the problem of linear regression with heavy-tailed distributions. Different from previous studies that use the squared loss to measure the performance, we choose the absolute loss, which is capable of estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-26 Lijun Zhang , Zhi-Hua Zhou

We study mean change point testing problems for high-dimensional data, with exponentially- or polynomially-decaying tails. In each case, depending on the $\ell_0$-norm of the mean change vector, we separately consider dense and sparse…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Mengchu Li , Yudong Chen , Tengyao Wang , Yi Yu

Heavy-tailed metrics are common and often critical to product evaluation in the online world. While we may have samples large enough for Central Limit Theorem to kick in, experimentation is challenging due to the wide confidence interval of…

Applications · Statistics 2019-05-23 Jason , Wang , Pauline Burke

The goal of compressed sensing is to estimate a high dimensional vector from an underdetermined system of noisy linear equations. In analogy to classical compressed sensing, here we assume a generative model as a prior, that is, we assume…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-24 Ajil Jalal , Liu Liu , Alexandros G. Dimakis , Constantine Caramanis

Datasets with extreme observations and/or heavy-tailed error distributions are commonly encountered and should be analyzed with careful consideration of these features from a statistical perspective. Small deviations from an assumed model,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-12 Meadhbh O'Neill , Kevin Burke

Robust estimation of location is a fundamental problem in statistics, particularly in scenarios where data contamination by outliers or model misspecification is a concern. In univariate settings, methods such as the sample median and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-07 Alejandro Cholaquidis , Ricardo Fraiman , Leonardo Moreno , Gonzalo Perera

Linear regression is ubiquitous in statistical analysis. It is well understood that conflicting sources of information may contaminate the inference when the classical normality of errors is assumed. The contamination caused by the light…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-13 Philippe Gagnon , Alain Desgagné , Mylène Bédard

High-dimensional datasets are frequently subject to contamination by outliers and heavy-tailed noise, which can severely bias standard regularized estimators like the Lasso. While Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) has recently been introduced…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-25 Xiaoning Kang , Lulu Kang

High-dimensional covariance estimation is notoriously sensitive to outliers. While statistically optimal estimators exist for general heavy-tailed distributions, they often rely on computationally expensive techniques like semidefinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-06 Even He

A weighted likelihood technique for robust estimation of a multivariate Wrapped Normal distribution for data points scattered on a p-dimensional torus is proposed. The occurrence of outliers in the sample at hand can badly compromise…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-01 Giovanni Saraceno , Claudio Agostinelli , Luca Greco