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This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-12 Chao Sun , Huiming Zhang , Bo Chen , Li Yu

We propose and analyze a new estimator of the covariance matrix that admits strong theoretical guarantees under weak assumptions on the underlying distribution, such as existence of moments of only low order. While estimation of covariance…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-01-17 Stanislav Minsker , Xiaohan Wei

In existing distributed stochastic optimization studies, it is usually assumed that the gradient noise has a bounded variance. However, recent research shows that the heavy-tailed noise, which allows an unbounded variance, is closer to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Jun Hu , Chao Sun , Bo Chen , Jianzheng Wang , Zheming Wang

We address the problem of robust sparse estimation of the precision matrix for heavy-tailed distributions in high-dimensional settings. In such high-dimensional contexts, we observe that the covariance matrix can be approximated by a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-06 Zhengke Lu , Long Feng

We study the problem of heavy-tailed mean estimation in settings where the variance of the data-generating distribution does not exist. Concretely, given a sample $\mathbf{X} = \{X_i\}_{i = 1}^n$ from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-10 Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri , Nilesh Tripuraneni , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

This work studies applications and generalizations of a simple estimation technique that provides exponential concentration under heavy-tailed distributions, assuming only bounded low-order moments. We show that the technique can be used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-19 Daniel Hsu , Sivan Sabato

In this paper, we study problem of estimating a sparse regression vector with correct support in the presence of outlier samples. The inconsistency of lasso-type methods is well known in this scenario. We propose a combinatorial version of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Adarsh Barik , Jean Honorio

By introducing a weight function into the density power divergence, we develop a new class of robust and smooth estimators for the tail index of Pareto-type distributions, offering improved efficiency in the presence of outliers. These…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-25 Saida Mancer , Abdelhakim Necir , Djamel Meraghni

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 benchmark the robustness of maximum likelihood based uncertainty estimation methods to outliers in training data for regression tasks. Outliers or noisy labels in training data results in degraded performances as well as incorrect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Deebul S. Nair , Nico Hochgeschwender , Miguel A. Olivares-Mendez

We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Kaiyuan Zhou , Xiaoyu Zhang , Wenyang Zhang , Di Wang

Data subject to heavy-tailed errors are commonly encountered in various scientific fields, especially in the modern era with explosion of massive data. To address this problem, procedures based on quantile regression and Least Absolute…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-10-09 Jianqing Fan , Quefeng Li , Yuyan Wang

Low-rank tensor models are widely used in statistics. However, most existing methods rely heavily on the assumption that data follows a sub-Gaussian distribution. To address the challenges associated with heavy-tailed distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-16 Xiaoyu Zhang , Di Wang , Guodong Li , Defeng Sun

Estimating a high-dimensional sparse covariance matrix from a limited number of samples is a fundamental problem in contemporary data analysis. Most proposals to date, however, are not robust to outliers or heavy tails. Towards bridging…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-04 John Goes , Gilad Lerman , Boaz Nadler

Let $X$ be a random variable with unknown mean and finite variance. We present a new estimator of the mean of $X$ that is robust with respect to the possible presence of outliers in the sample, provides tight sub-Gaussian deviation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Stanislav Minsker , Mohamed Ndaoud

We present a new quantum algorithm for estimating the mean of a real-valued random variable obtained as the output of a quantum computation. Our estimator achieves a nearly-optimal quadratic speedup over the number of classical i.i.d.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-11-16 Yassine Hamoudi

This paper studies low-rank matrix completion in the presence of heavy-tailed and possibly asymmetric noise, where we aim to estimate an underlying low-rank matrix given a set of highly incomplete noisy entries. Though the matrix completion…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-10 Bingyan Wang , Jianqing Fan

Linear inverse problems are ubiquitous. Often the measurements do not follow a Gaussian distribution. Additionally, a model matrix with a large condition number can complicate the problem further by making it ill-posed. In this case, the…

Recently, a number of mostly $\ell_1$-norm regularized least squares type deterministic algorithms have been proposed to address the problem of \emph{sparse} adaptive signal estimation and system identification. From a Bayesian perspective,…

We study the problem of estimating the covariance matrix of a high-dimensional distribution when a small constant fraction of the samples can be arbitrarily corrupted. Recent work gave the first polynomial time algorithms for this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Yu Cheng , Ilias Diakonikolas , Rong Ge , David Woodruff