Related papers: List-Decodable Mean Estimation in Nearly-PCA Time
We study the problem of robustly learning multi-dimensional histograms. A $d$-dimensional function $h: D \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is called a $k$-histogram if there exists a partition of the domain $D \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$ into $k$…
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…
$k$-means++ is an important algorithm for choosing initial cluster centers for the $k$-means clustering algorithm. In this work, we present a new algorithm that can solve the $k$-means++ problem with nearly optimal running time. Given $n$…
This paper presents a class of new algorithms for distributed statistical estimation that exploit divide-and-conquer approach. We show that one of the key benefits of the divide-and-conquer strategy is robustness, an important…
This paper considers sparse linear discriminant analysis of high-dimensional data. In contrast to the existing methods which are based on separate estimation of the precision matrix $\O$ and the difference $\de$ of the mean vectors, we…
We study the problem, introduced by Qiao and Valiant, of learning from untrusted batches. Here, we assume $m$ users, all of whom have samples from some underlying distribution $p$ over $1, \ldots, n$. Each user sends a batch of $k$ i.i.d.…
The $k$-$\mathtt{means}$++ seeding algorithm (Arthur & Vassilvitskii, 2007) is widely used in practice for the $k$-means clustering problem where the goal is to cluster a dataset $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R} ^d$ into $k$ clusters. The…
We consider the problem of Robust PCA in the fully and partially observed settings. Without corruptions, this is the well-known matrix completion problem. From a statistical standpoint this problem has been recently well-studied, and…
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in…
We study a fundamental stochastic selection problem involving $n$ independent random variables, each of which can be queried at some cost. Given a tolerance level $\delta$, the goal is to find a value that is $\delta$-approximately minimum…
Clustering is a popular form of unsupervised learning for geometric data. Unfortunately, many clustering algorithms lead to cluster assignments that are hard to explain, partially because they depend on all the features of the data in a…
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed mean estimation with 1-bit communication constraints. We propose a mean estimator that is based on (randomized and sequentially-chosen) interval queries, whose 1-bit outcome indicates…
We study the problem of computing the minimum cut in a weighted distributed message-passing networks (the CONGEST model). Let $\lambda$ be the minimum cut, $n$ be the number of nodes in the network, and $D$ be the network diameter. Our…
We study the problem of computationally efficient robust estimation of the covariance/scatter matrix of elliptical distributions -- that is, affine transformations of spherically symmetric distributions -- under the strong contamination…
We consider an $n$ agents distributed optimization problem with imperfect information characterized in a parametric sense, where the unknown parameter can be solved by a distinct distributed parameter learning problem. Though each agent…
Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…
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…
The problem of robust mean estimation in high dimensions is studied, in which a certain fraction (less than half) of the datapoints can be arbitrarily corrupted. Motivated by compressive sensing, the robust mean estimation problem is…
We give a highly efficient "semi-agnostic" algorithm for learning univariate probability distributions that are well approximated by piecewise polynomial density functions. Let $p$ be an arbitrary distribution over an interval $I$ which is…
Recently, due to an increasing interest for transparency in artificial intelligence, several methods of explainable machine learning have been developed with the simultaneous goal of accuracy and interpretability by humans. In this paper,…