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Traditionally, robust statistics has focused on designing estimators tolerant to a minority of contaminated data. Robust list-decodable learning focuses on the more challenging regime where only a minority $\frac 1 k$ fraction of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Daniel Kongsgaard , Jerry Li , Kevin Tian

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

Elliptically symmetric distributions are a classic example of a semiparametric model where the location vector and the scatter matrix (or a parameterization of them) are the two finite-dimensional parameters of interest, while the density…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-18 Stefano Fortunati , Jean-Pierre Delmas , Esa Ollila

In this work, we give efficient algorithms for privately estimating a Gaussian distribution in both pure and approximate differential privacy (DP) models with optimal dependence on the dimension in the sample complexity. In the pure DP…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Daniel Alabi , Pravesh K. Kothari , Pranay Tankala , Prayaag Venkat , Fred Zhang

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

We study the sublinear multivariate mean estimation problem in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. Specifically, we aim to find the mean $\mu$ of a ground point set $A$, which minimizes the sum of squared Euclidean distances of the points in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Beatrice Bertolotti , Matteo Russo , Chris Schwiegelshohn , Sudarshan Shyam

Descriptive statistics for parametric models are currently highly sensative to departures, gross errors, and/or random errors. Here, leveraging the structures of parametric distributions and their central moment kernel distributions, a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-11 Li Tuobang

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

As the most fundamental problem in statistics, robust location estimation has many prominent solutions, such as the trimmed mean, Winsorized mean, Hodges Lehmann estimator, Huber M estimator, and median of means. Recent studies suggest that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-12 Li Tuobang

The advent of large-scale inference has spurred reexamination of conventional statistical thinking. In a Gaussian model for $n$ many $z$-scores with at most $k < \frac{n}{2}$ nonnulls, Efron suggests estimating the location and scale…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-15 Subhodh Kotekal , Chao Gao

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

The aim of this Lecture Note is to introduce the Signal Processing (SP) community to a powerful yet still under-utilised tool: the semiparametric statistics. In short, the semiparametric framework allows us to estimate or perform hypothesis…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-26 Stefano Fortunati

The present study proposes incorporating non-parametric knowledge into the diffusion least-mean-squares algorithm in the framework of a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. The proposed algorithm leads to a robust estimation of an unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Soheil Ashkezari-Toussi , Hadi sadoghi-Yazdi

We show that the mean-model parameter is always orthogonal to the error distribution in generalized linear models. Thus, the maximum likelihood estimator of the mean-model parameter will be asymptotically efficient regardless of whether the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-08 Alan Huang , Paul J. Rathouz

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 consider the problem of estimating the arithmetic average of a finite collection of real vectors stored in a distributed fashion across several compute nodes subject to a communication budget constraint. Our analysis does not rely on any…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2016-11-24 Jakub Konečný , Peter Richtárik

We develop efficient algorithms for estimating low-degree moments of unknown distributions in the presence of adversarial outliers. The guarantees of our algorithms improve in many cases significantly over the best previous ones, obtained…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-12-27 Pravesh K. Kothari , David Steurer

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-16 Mark Huber

We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-20 Constantinos Daskalakis , Gautam Kamath

This paper is devoted to the estimators of the mean that provide strong non-asymptotic guarantees under minimal assumptions on the underlying distribution. The main ideas behind proposed techniques are based on bridging the notions of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-07 Stanislav Minsker