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Related papers: A fast and slightly robust covariance estimator

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A classical approach to accurately estimating the covariance matrix \Sigma of a p-variate normal distribution is to draw a sample of size n > p and form a sample covariance matrix. However, many modern applications operate with much smaller…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-03-05 Elizaveta Levina , Roman Vershynin

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.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-11-16 Yassine Hamoudi

In this work, we revisit the problem of estimating the mean and covariance of an unknown $d$-dimensional Gaussian distribution in the presence of an $\varepsilon$-fraction of adversarial outliers. The pioneering work of [DKK+16] gave a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Pravesh K. Kothari , Peter Manohar , Brian Hu Zhang

We study the algorithmic problem of sparse mean estimation in the presence of adversarial outliers. Specifically, the algorithm observes a \emph{corrupted} set of samples from $\mathcal{N}(\mu,\mathbf{I}_d)$, where the unknown mean $\mu \in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Ankit Pensia

The problem of estimating the covariance matrix $\Sigma$ of a $p$-variate distribution based on its $n$ observations arises in many data analysis contexts. While for $n>p$, the classical sample covariance matrix $\hat{\Sigma}_n$ is a good…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-09-28 Maryia Kabanava , Holger Rauhut

We consider the problem of estimating the covariance structure of a random vector $Y\in \mathbb R^d$ from a sample $Y_1,\ldots,Y_n$. We are interested in the situation when $d$ is large compared to $n$ but the covariance matrix $\Sigma$ of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-08 Stanislav Minsker , Lang Wang

This work studies applications and generalizations of a simple estimation technique that provides exponential concentration under heavy-tailed distributions, assuming only bounded low-order moments. We show that the technique can be used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-19 Daniel Hsu , Sivan Sabato

We study a class of robust mean estimators $\widehat{\mu}$ obtained by adaptively shrinking the weights of sample points far from a base estimator $\widehat{\kappa}$. Given a data-dependent scaling factor $\widehat{\alpha}$ and a weighting…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Antônio Catão , Lucas Resende , Paulo Orenstein

We study the fundamental problem of high-dimensional mean estimation in a robust model where a constant fraction of the samples are adversarially corrupted. Recent work gave the first polynomial time algorithms for this problem with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Yu Cheng , Ilias Diakonikolas , Rong Ge

We study the sample complexity of estimating the covariance matrix $\mathbf{\Sigma} \in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}$ of a distribution $\mathcal D$ over $\mathbb{R}^d$ given independent samples, under the assumption that $\mathbf{\Sigma}$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Raj Kumar Maity , Cameron Musco

Covariance estimation becomes challenging in the regime where the number p of variables outstrips the number n of samples available to construct the estimate. One way to circumvent this problem is to assume that the covariance matrix is…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-06-14 Richard Y. Chen , Alex Gittens , Joel A. Tropp

High-dimensional covariance estimation is notoriously sensitive to outliers. While statistically optimal estimators exist for general heavy-tailed distributions, they often rely on computationally expensive techniques like semidefinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-06 Even He

Let $X_1,..., X_n \in \mathbb{R}^d$ be independent Gaussian random vectors with independent entries and variance profile $(b_{ij})_{i \in [d],j \in [n]}$. A major question in the study of covariance estimation is to give precise control on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-07-19 Patrick Oliveira Santos

Let $Y$ be a $d$-dimensional random vector with unknown mean $\mu$ and covariance matrix $\Sigma$. This paper is motivated by the problem of designing an estimator of $\Sigma$ that admits tight deviation bounds in the operator norm under…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-03-09 Stanislav Minsker , Xiaohan Wei

The covariance matrix $\boldsymbol{\Sigma}$ of non-linear clustering statistics that are measured in current and upcoming surveys is of fundamental interest for comparing cosmological theory and data and a crucial ingredient for the…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2022-04-13 Nicolas Chartier , Benjamin D. Wandelt

We propose a randomized algorithm with query access that given a graph $G$ with arboricity $\alpha$, and average degree $d$, makes $\widetilde{O}\left(\frac{\alpha}{\varepsilon^2d}\right)$ \texttt{Degree} and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Debarshi Chanda

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Ankit Pensia , Thanasis Pittas

Traditionally, robust statistics has focused on designing estimators tolerant to a minority of contaminated data. Robust list-decodable learning focuses on the more challenging regime where only a minority $\frac 1 k$ fraction of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Daniel Kongsgaard , Jerry Li , Kevin Tian

We consider covariance estimation of any subgaussian distribution from finitely many i.i.d. samples that are quantized to one bit of information per entry. Recent work has shown that a reliable estimator can be constructed if uniformly…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-15 Sjoerd Dirksen , Johannes Maly

We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-06-03 Jayadev Acharya , Ilias Diakonikolas , Jerry Li , Ludwig Schmidt