Related papers: Optimality in Mean Estimation: Beyond Worst-Case, …
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…
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.…
Given data drawn from a collection of Gaussian variables with a common mean but different and unknown variances, what is the best algorithm for estimating their common mean? We present an intuitive and efficient algorithm for this task. As…
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…
We study the problem of outlier robust high-dimensional mean estimation under a finite covariance assumption, and more broadly under finite low-degree moment assumptions. We consider a standard stability condition from the recent robust…
We propose the first near-optimal quantum algorithm for estimating in Euclidean norm the mean of a vector-valued random variable with finite mean and covariance. Our result aims at extending the theory of multivariate sub-Gaussian…
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…
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 study polynomial time algorithms for estimating the mean of a heavy-tailed multivariate random vector. We assume only that the random vector $X$ has finite mean and covariance. In this setting, the radius of confidence intervals achieved…
We consider distributed estimation of the inverse covariance matrix, also called the concentration or precision matrix, in Gaussian graphical models. Traditional centralized estimation often requires global inference of the covariance…
We study the problem of robustly estimating the mean or location parameter without moment assumptions. We show that for a large class of symmetric distributions, the same error as in the Gaussian setting can be achieved efficiently. The…
We propose an estimator for the mean of a random vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that can be computed in time $O(n^4+n^2d)$ for $n$ i.i.d.~samples and that has error bounds matching the sub-Gaussian case. The only assumptions we make about the…
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…
This paper addresses the following question: given a sample of i.i.d. random variables with finite variance, can one construct an estimator of the unknown mean that performs nearly as well as if the data were normally distributed? One of…
We consider a high-dimensional mean estimation problem over a binary hidden Markov model, which illuminates the interplay between memory in data, sample size, dimension, and signal strength in statistical inference. In this model, an…
We study the following fundamental hypothesis testing problem, which we term Gaussian mean testing. Given i.i.d. samples from a distribution $p$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, the task is to distinguish, with high probability, between the following…
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…
We consider the problem of robust mean and location estimation w.r.t. any pseudo-norm of the form $x\in\mathbb{R}^d\to ||x||_S = \sup_{v\in S}<v,x>$ where $S$ is any symmetric subset of $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that the deviation-optimal…
We introduce a framework for statistical estimation that leverages knowledge of how samples are collected but makes no distributional assumptions on the data values. Specifically, we consider a population of elements $[n]={1,\ldots,n}$ with…
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…