Related papers: Testing Support Size More Efficiently Than Learnin…
The classic problems of testing uniformity of and learning a discrete distribution, given access to independent samples from it, are examined under general $\ell_p$ metrics. The intuitions and results often contrast with the classic…
The Huge Object model is a distribution testing model in which we are given access to independent samples from an unknown distribution over the set of strings $\{0,1\}^n$, but are only allowed to query a few bits from the samples. We…
Given samples from an unknown distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ belongs to some class of distributions $\mathcal{C}$ versus $p$ being far from every distribution in $\mathcal{C}$? This fundamental question has…
We investigate the problem of testing whether a discrete probability distribution over an ordered domain is a histogram on a specified number of bins. One of the most common tools for the succinct approximation of data, $k$-histograms over…
We investigate the problem of testing the equivalence between two discrete histograms. A {\em $k$-histogram} over $[n]$ is a probability distribution that is piecewise constant over some set of $k$ intervals over $[n]$. Histograms have been…
We consider the problem of estimating the support size of a discrete distribution whose minimum non-zero mass is at least $ \frac{1}{k}$. Under the independent sampling model, we show that the sample complexity, i.e., the minimal sample…
We consider the problem of estimating the support size of a distribution $D$. Our investigations are pursued through the lens of distribution testing and seek to understand the power of conditional sampling (denoted as COND), wherein one is…
In this work, we consider the sample complexity required for testing the monotonicity of distributions over partial orders. A distribution $p$ over a poset is monotone if, for any pair of domain elements $x$ and $y$ such that $x \preceq y$,…
Let $p$ be an unknown and arbitrary probability distribution over $[0,1)$. We consider the problem of {\em density estimation}, in which a learning algorithm is given i.i.d. draws from $p$ and must (with high probability) output a…
We consider the problem of estimating the number of distinct elements in a large data set (or, equivalently, the support size of the distribution induced by the data set) from a random sample of its elements. The problem occurs in many…
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,…
Estimating the support size of a distribution is a well-studied problem in statistics. Motivated by the fact that this problem is highly non-robust (as small perturbations in the distributions can drastically affect the support size) and…
Histograms, i.e., piece-wise constant approximations, are a popular tool used to represent data distributions. Traditionally, the difference between the histogram and the underlying distribution (i.e., the approximation error) is measured…
We study the problem of generalized uniformity testing \cite{BC17} of a discrete probability distribution: Given samples from a probability distribution $p$ over an {\em unknown} discrete domain $\mathbf{\Omega}$, we want to distinguish,…
We study the problem of testing discrete distributions with a focus on the high probability regime. Specifically, given samples from one or more discrete distributions, a property $\mathcal{P}$, and parameters $0< \epsilon, \delta <1$, we…
A Poisson Binomial distribution over $n$ variables is the distribution of the sum of $n$ independent Bernoullis. We provide a sample near-optimal algorithm for testing whether a distribution $P$ supported on $\{0,...,n\}$ to which we have…
State-of-the-art parallel sorting algorithms for distributed-memory architectures are based on computing a balanced partitioning via sampling and histogramming. By finding samples that partition the sorted keys into evenly-sized chunks,…
We investigate the problem of identity testing for multidimensional histogram distributions. A distribution $p: D \rightarrow \mathbb{R}_+$, where $D \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$, is called a $k$-histogram if there exists a partition of the…
We study the problem of testing identity against a given distribution with a focus on the high confidence regime. More precisely, given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ over $n$ elements, an explicitly given distribution $q$, and…
This note concerns a somewhat innocent question motivated by an observation concerning the use of Chebyshev bounds on sample estimates of $p$ in the binomial distribution with parameters $n,p$. Namely, what moment order produces the best…