Related papers: On the tensorization of the variational distance
Total variation distance (TV distance) is a fundamental notion of distance between probability distributions. In this work, we introduce and study the problem of computing the TV distance of two product distributions over the domain…
We study the problem of approximating the total variation distance between two mixtures of product distributions over an $n$-dimensional discrete domain. Given two mixtures $\mathbb{P}$ and $\mathbb{Q}$ with $k_1$ and $k_2$ product…
Total variation distance (TV distance) is an important measure for the difference between two distributions. Recently, there has been progress in approximating the TV distance between product distributions: a deterministic algorithm for a…
We study the total variation distance (TV) between two $n$-fold Bernoulli product measures parametrized by $\vec p=(p_1,\ldots,p_n)$ and $\vec q=(q_1,\ldots,q_n)$, respectively, in the \emph{tiny} and \emph{small} regimes. In the tiny…
We investigate some previously unexplored (or underexplored) computational aspects of total variation (TV) distance. First, we give a simple deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for checking equivalence between mixtures of product…
We show that computing the total variation distance between two product distributions is $\#\mathsf{P}$-complete. This is in stark contrast with other distance measures such as Kullback-Leibler, Chi-square, and Hellinger, which tensorize…
We study the relation between the total variation (TV) and Hellinger distances between two Gaussian location mixtures. Our first result establishes a general upper bound: for any two mixing distributions supported on a compact set, the…
A homogenization principle for total variation We prove an inequality comparing the variational distance between pairs of product probability measures to its homogenized counterpart. If $P_1,\ldots,P_n,Q_1,\ldots,Q_n$ are arbitrary…
Two-sample testing, where we aim to determine whether two distributions are equal or not equal based on samples from each one, is challenging if we cannot place assumptions on the properties of the two distributions. In particular,…
The total variation distance is a metric of central importance in statistics and probability theory. However, somewhat surprisingly, questions about computing it algorithmically appear not to have been systematically studied until very…
The total variation distance is a core statistical distance between probability measures that satisfies the metric axioms, with value always falling in $[0,1]$. This distance plays a fundamental role in machine learning and signal…
New lower bounds on the total variation distance between the distribution of a sum of independent Bernoulli random variables and the Poisson random variable (with the same mean) are derived via the Chen-Stein method. The new bounds rely on…
Let P and Q be two probability distributions which differ only for values with non-zero probability. We show that the variational distance between the n-fold product distributions P^n and Q^n cannot grow faster than the square root of n.
For arbitrary two probability measures on real d-space with given means and variances (covariance matrices), we provide lower bounds for their total variation distance. In the one-dimensional case, a tight bound is given.
In this work, we continue the line of research on the complexity of distributions (Viola, Journal of Computing 2012), and study samplers defined by low degree polynomials. An $n$-tuple $P = (P_1,\dots, P_n)$ of functions $P_i \colon…
We are interested in the estimation of the distance in total variation $$ \Delta := \|P_{f(X)} - P_{g(X)}\|_{\mathrm var} $$ between distributions of random variables $f(X)$ and $g(X)$ in terms of proximity of $f$ and $g.$ We propose a…
This work is about the total variation (TV) minimization which is used for recovering gradient-sparse signals from compressed measurements. Recent studies indicate that TV minimization exhibits a phase transition behavior from failure to…
In this paper, we derive some upper and lower bounds and inequalities for the total variation distance (TVD) and the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), also known as the relative entropy, between two probability measures $\mu$ and $\nu$…
Mixtures of high dimensional Gaussian distributions have been studied extensively in statistics and learning theory. While the total variation distance appears naturally in the sample complexity of distribution learning, it is analytically…
Given two high-dimensional Gaussians with the same mean, we prove a lower and an upper bound for their total variation distance, which are within a constant factor of one another.