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Clustering is a popular machine learning technique for data mining that can process and analyze datasets to automatically reveal sample distribution patterns. Since the ubiquitous categorical data naturally lack a well-defined metric space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Yiqun Zhang , Mingjie Zhao , Hong Jia , Yang Lu , Mengke Li , Yiu-ming Cheung

We study distribution testing without direct access to a source of relevant data, but rather to one where only a tiny fraction is relevant. To enable this, we introduce the following verification query model. The goal is to perform a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hadley Black , Christopher Ye

Testing whether the observed data conforms to a purported model (probability distribution) is a basic and fundamental statistical task, and one that is by now well understood. However, the standard formulation, identity testing, fails to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-05-06 Clément L. Canonne , Karl Wimmer

In the uniformity testing task, an algorithm is provided with samples from an unknown probability distribution over a (known) finite domain, and must decide whether it is the uniform distribution, or, alternatively, if its total variation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Guy Blanc , Clément L. Canonne , Erik Waingarten

It is essential for safety-critical applications of deep neural networks to determine when new inputs are significantly different from the training distribution. In this paper, we explore this out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Poulami Sinhamahapatra , Rajat Koner , Karsten Roscher , Stephan Günnemann

In this paper, we consider the problem of testing properties of joint distributions under the Conditional Sampling framework. In the standard sampling model, the sample complexity of testing properties of joint distributions is exponential…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Rishiraj Bhattacharyya , Sourav Chakraborty

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-23 Shivam Gupta , Eric Price

One of the most fundamental problems in distribution testing is the identity testing problem: given samples $x_1,\ldots,x_s$, the goal is to determine whether the samples are drawn from a target distribution $\mathcal{D}$. When…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-15 Bruno Cavalar , Eli Goldin , Matthew Gray , Taiga Hiroka , Min-Hsiu Hsieh , Tomoyuki Morimae

We study the identity testing problem for high-dimensional distributions. Given as input an explicit distribution $\mu$, an $\varepsilon>0$, and access to sampling oracle(s) for a hidden distribution $\pi$, the goal in identity testing is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Antonio Blanca , Zongchen Chen , Daniel Štefankovič , Eric Vigoda

Recently, there has been significant work studying distribution testing under the Conditional Sampling model. In this model, a query specifies a subset $S$ of the domain, and the output received is a sample drawn from the distribution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Shyam Narayanan

An unbinned statistical test on cluster-like deviations from Poisson processes for point process data is introduced, presented in the context of time variability analysis of astrophysical sources in count rate experiments. The measure of…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Juergen Prahl

We study quantum algorithms for verifying properties of the output probability distribution of a classical or quantum circuit, given access to the source code that generates the distribution. We consider the basic task of uniformity…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-11-08 Clément L. Canonne , Robin Kothari , Ryan O'Donnell

We consider the unsupervised learning problem of assigning labels to unlabeled data. A naive approach is to use clustering methods, but this works well only when data is properly clustered and each cluster corresponds to an underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-02 Marthinus Christoffel du Plessis , Masashi Sugiyama

Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning methodology where unlabeled elements/objects are grouped together aiming to the construction of well-established clusters that their elements are classified according to their similarity. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-20 Dimitrios Saligkaras , Vasileios E. Papageorgiou

In many modern statistical problems, the limited available data must be used both to develop the hypotheses to test, and to test these hypotheses-that is, both for exploratory and confirmatory data analysis. Reusing the same dataset for…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-24 Youngjoo Yun , Rina Foygel Barber

Consider unsupervised clustering of objects drawn from a discrete set, through the use of human intelligence available in crowdsourcing platforms. This paper defines and studies the problem of universal clustering using responses of crowd…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2016-10-11 Ravi Kiran Raman , Lav Varshney

In this paper, we test whether two datasets share a common clustering structure. As a leading example, we focus on comparing clustering structures in two independent random samples from two mixtures of multivariate normal distributions.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-21 Chao Gao , Zongming Ma

Many high dimensional vector distances tend to a constant. This is typically considered a negative "contrast-loss" phenomenon that hinders clustering and other machine learning techniques. We reinterpret "contrast-loss" as a blessing.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Wen-Yan Lin , Siying Liu , Jian-Huang Lai , Yasuyuki Matsushita

We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions. In the standard model, where we have sample access to an underlying distribution $p$, extensive research has established optimal bounds for uniformity testing,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Piotr Indyk , Ronitt Rubinfeld , Sandeep Silwal

Distributed processing over networks relies on in-network processing and cooperation among neighboring agents. Cooperation is beneficial when agents share a common objective. However, in many applications agents may belong to different…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-19 Xiaochuan Zhao , Ali H. Sayed