Related papers: A basic lower bound for property testing
In Bayesian hypothesis testing, evidence for a statistical model is quantified by the Bayes factor, which represents the relative likelihood of observed data under that model compared to another competing model. In general, computing Bayes…
Likelihood ratio tests are intuitively appealing. Nevertheless, a number of examples are known in which they perform very poorly. The present paper discusses a large class of situations in which this is the case, and analyzes just how…
In statistical inference problems, we wish to obtain lower bounds on the minimax risk, that is to bound the performance of any possible estimator. A standard technique to obtain risk lower bounds involves the use of Fano's inequality. In an…
Counterfactual explanations are a common approach to providing recourse to data subjects. However, current methodology can produce counterfactuals that cannot be achieved by the subject, making the use of counterfactuals for recourse…
The field of query-by-example aims at inferring queries from output examples given by non-expert users, by finding the underlying logic that binds the examples. However, for a very small set of examples, it is difficult to correctly infer…
Most work on adaptive data analysis assumes that samples in the dataset are independent. When correlations are allowed, even the non-adaptive setting can become intractable, unless some structural constraints are imposed. To address this,…
We prove that given a computable metric space and two computable measures, the set of points that have high universal uniform test scores with respect to the first measure will have a lower bound with respect to the second measure. This…
This note uses a simple example to show how moment inequality models used in the empirical economics literature lead to general minimax relative efficiency comparisons. The main point is that such models involve inference on a low…
The model of relative-error property testing of Boolean functions has been the subject of significant recent research effort [CDH+24][CPPS25a][CPPS25b] In this paper we consider the problem of relative-error testing an unknown and arbitrary…
We consider debiased inference on finite-dimensional functionals of infinite-dimensional least-squares solutions to inverse problems as a way to avoid having to assume exact solutions exist. Such assumptions are substantive and not…
The central result of this paper is the small-is-very-small principle for restricted sequential theories. The principle says roughly that whenever the given theory shows that a property has a small witness, i.e. a witness in every definable…
In this paper we study an application of an information distance between two measurements to the problem of non-contextuality and local realism. We postulate the triangle principle which states that any information distance is well defined…
Testing efficiently whether a finite set with a binary operation over it, given as an oracle, is a group is a well-known open problem in the field of property testing. Recently, Friedl, Ivanyos and Santha have made a significant step in the…
Statistical significance testing of differences in values of metrics like recall, precision and balanced F-score is a necessary part of empirical natural language processing. Unfortunately, we find in a set of experiments that many commonly…
We present an adaptive tester for the unateness property of Boolean functions. Given a function $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ the tester makes $O(n \log(n)/\epsilon)$ adaptive queries to the function. The tester always accepts a unate function,…
This short text tried to establish a big picture of what evidential statistics is about and how an ideal inference method should behave. Moreover, by examining shortcomings of some of the currently used methods for measuring evidence and…
We prove that any non-adaptive algorithm that tests whether an unknown Boolean function $f: \{0, 1\}^n\to \{0, 1\}$ is a $k$-junta or $\epsilon$-far from every $k$-junta must make $\widetilde{\Omega}(k^{3/2} / \epsilon)$ many queries for a…
We prove a $k^{-\Omega(\log(\varepsilon_2 - \varepsilon_1))}$ lower bound for adaptively testing whether a Boolean function is $\varepsilon_1$-close to or $\varepsilon_2$-far from $k$-juntas. Our results provide the first superpolynomial…
In this paper, we discuss the use of $\varepsilon$-admissibility for estimation in high-dimensional and nonparametric statistical models. The minimax rate of convergence is widely used to compare the performance of estimators in…
Correlated proportions arise in longitudinal (panel) studies. A typical example is the ``opinion swing'' problem: ``Has the proportion of people favoring a politician changed after his recent speech to the nation on TV?''. Since the same…