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Related papers: Robust Sparse Mean Estimation via Sum of Squares

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We study the fundamental problems of Gaussian mean estimation and linear regression with Gaussian covariates in the presence of Huber contamination. Our main contribution is the design of the first sample near-optimal and almost linear-time…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Ankit Pensia , Thanasis Pittas

Robust mean estimation is the problem of estimating the mean $\mu \in \mathbb{R}^d$ of a $d$-dimensional distribution $D$ from a list of independent samples, an $\epsilon$-fraction of which have been arbitrarily corrupted by a malicious…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

We consider estimation models of the form $Y=X^*+N$, where $X^*$ is some $m$-dimensional signal we wish to recover, and $N$ is symmetrically distributed noise that may be unbounded in all but a small $\alpha$ fraction of the entries. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Tommaso d'Orsi , Rajai Nasser , Gleb Novikov , David Steurer

We give the first polynomial-time algorithm to estimate the mean of a $d$-variate probability distribution with bounded covariance from $\tilde{O}(d)$ independent samples subject to pure differential privacy. Prior algorithms for this…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Samuel B. Hopkins , Gautam Kamath , Mahbod Majid

We study a new linear up to quadratic time algorithm for linear regression in the absence of strong assumptions on the underlying distributions of samples, and in the presence of outliers. The goal is to design a procedure which comes with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-14 Jules Depersin

We study the problem of list-decodable sparse mean estimation. Specifically, for a parameter $\alpha \in (0, 1/2)$, we are given $m$ points in $\mathbb{R}^n$, $\lfloor \alpha m \rfloor$ of which are i.i.d. samples from a distribution $D$…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Sushrut Karmalkar , Ankit Pensia , Thanasis Pittas

In this paper we initiate the study of whether or not sparse estimation tasks can be performed efficiently in high dimensions, in the robust setting where an $\eps$-fraction of samples are corrupted adversarially. We study the natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Jerry Li

Statistical and machine-learning algorithms are frequently applied to high-dimensional data. In many of these applications data is scarce, and often much more costly than computation time. We provide the first sample-efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-20 Jayadev Acharya , Ashkan Jafarpour , Alon Orlitsky , Ananda Theertha Suresh

We explore the connection between outlier-robust high-dimensional statistics and non-convex optimization in the presence of sparsity constraints, with a focus on the fundamental tasks of robust sparse mean estimation and robust sparse PCA.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Yu Cheng , Ilias Diakonikolas , Rong Ge , Shivam Gupta , Daniel M. Kane , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

We study the problem of high-dimensional linear regression in a robust model where an $\epsilon$-fraction of the samples can be adversarially corrupted. We focus on the fundamental setting where the covariates of the uncorrupted samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-04 Ilias Diakonikolas , Weihao Kong , Alistair Stewart

In this paper, we study the problem of sparse mean estimation under adversarial corruptions, where the goal is to estimate the $k$-sparse mean of a heavy-tailed distribution from samples contaminated by adversarial noise. Existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jianhao Ma , Rui Ray Chen , Yinghui He , Salar Fattahi , Wei Hu

We construct an algorithm, running in time $\tilde{\mathcal O}(N d + uK d)$, which is robust to outliers and heavy-tailed data and which achieves the subgaussian rate from [Lugosi, Mendelson] \begin{equation}\label{eq:intro_subgaus_rate}…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-06-28 Jules Depersin , Guillaume Lecué

We study the efficient learnability of high-dimensional Gaussian mixtures in the outlier-robust setting, where a small constant fraction of the data is adversarially corrupted. We resolve the polynomial learnability of this problem when the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-05-14 Ilias Diakonikolas , Samuel B. Hopkins , Daniel Kane , Sushrut Karmalkar

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…

Applications · Statistics 2022-12-08 Aditya Deshmukh , Jing Liu , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

We revisit the problem of robust linear regression under Gaussian covariates with an unknown covariance matrix of condition number $\kappa$. For this fundamental problem, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the trade-offs among…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Deeksha Adil , Jarosław Błasiok , Hongjie Chen , Deepak Narayanan Sridharan

We study the algorithmic problem of robust mean estimation of an identity covariance Gaussian in the presence of mean-shift contamination. In this contamination model, we are given a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ generated i.i.d. via the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Ilias Diakonikolas , Giannis Iakovidis , Daniel M. Kane , Thanasis Pittas

We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-18 Jasper C. H. Lee , Paul Valiant

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Gleb Novikov

We study the problem of high-dimensional robust mean estimation in the presence of a constant fraction of adversarial outliers. A recent line of work has provided sophisticated polynomial-time algorithms for this problem with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Yu Cheng , Ilias Diakonikolas , Rong Ge , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

We study efficient algorithms for linear regression and covariance estimation in the absence of Gaussian assumptions on the underlying distributions of samples, making assumptions instead about only finitely-many moments. We focus on how…