Related papers: Sharp indistinguishability bounds from non-uniform…
We use the Sum of Squares method to develop new efficient algorithms for learning well-separated mixtures of Gaussians and robust mean estimation, both in high dimensions, that substantially improve upon the statistical guarantees achieved…
We study the best uniform approximation by polynomials of fixed degree of the function sgn(x) on the union of two intervals symmetric with respect to the origin. We obtain precise asymptotics, with explicit constants, for the error of the…
For Gaussian random fields with values in $\mathbb{R}^d$, sharp upper and lower bounds on the probability of hitting a fixed set have been available for many years. These apply in particular to the solutions of systems of linear SPDEs. For…
An open problem that is widely regarded as one of the most important in quantum query complexity is to resolve the quantum query complexity of the k-distinctness function on inputs of size N. While the case of k=2 (also called Element…
We give a general unified method that can be used for $L_1$ {\em closeness testing} of a wide range of univariate structured distribution families. More specifically, we design a sample optimal and computationally efficient algorithm for…
Consider a set P of N random points on the unit sphere of dimension $d-1$, and the symmetrized set S = P union (-P). The halving polyhedron of S is defined as the convex hull of the set of centroids of N distinct points in S. We prove that…
We consider the closeness testing problem for discrete distributions. The goal is to distinguish whether two samples are drawn from the same unspecified distribution, or whether their respective distributions are separated in $L_1$-norm. In…
Consider a string of $n$ positions, i.e. a discrete string of length $n$. Units of length $k$ are placed at random on this string in such a way that they do not overlap, and as often as possible, i.e. until all spacings between neighboring…
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…
Given a set of strings over a specified alphabet, identifying a median or consensus string that minimizes the total distance to all input strings is a fundamental data aggregation problem. When the Hamming distance is considered as the…
Uniformity testing is one of the most well-studied problems in property testing, with many known test statistics, including ones based on counting collisions, singletons, and the empirical TV distance. It is known that the optimal sample…
We consider the problem of estimating the $L_1$ distance between two discrete probability measures $P$ and $Q$ from empirical data in a nonasymptotic and large alphabet setting. When $Q$ is known and one obtains $n$ samples from $P$, we…
We present new sharp results concerning multipliers and distance estimates in various spaces of harmonic functions in the unit ball of $R^n$.
We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…
In this paper, we compute the tightest possible bounds on the probability that the optimal value of a combinatorial optimization problem in maximization form with a random objective exceeds a given number, assuming only knowledge of the…
De, Trevisan and Tulsiani [CRYPTO 2010] show that every distribution over $n$-bit strings which has constant statistical distance to uniform (e.g., the output of a pseudorandom generator mapping $n-1$ to $n$ bit strings), can be…
We present two sharp, closed-form empirical Bernstein inequalities for symmetric random matrices with bounded eigenvalues. By sharp, we mean that both inequalities adapt to the unknown variance in a tight manner: the deviation captured by…
Tight bounds for several symmetric divergence measures are derived in terms of the total variation distance. It is shown that each of these bounds is attained by a pair of 2 or 3-element probability distributions. An application of these…
We consider testing the goodness-of-fit of a distribution against alternatives separated in sup norm. We study the twin settings of Poisson-generated count data with a large number of categories and high-dimensional multinomials. In…
A data sketch algorithm scans a big data set, collecting a small amount of data -- the sketch, which can be used to statistically infer properties of the big data set. Some data sketch algorithms take a fixed-size random sample of a big…