Related papers: Computational-Statistical Tradeoffs from NP-hardne…

It is well known that sparse approximation problem is \textsf{NP}-hard under general dictionaries. Several algorithms have been devised and analyzed in the past decade under various assumptions on the \emph{coherence} $\mu$ of the…

Strategic classification studies learning settings in which individuals can modify their features, at a cost, in order to influence the classifier's decision. A central question is how the sample complexity of the induced (strategic)…

For many learning problems one may not have access to fine grained label information; e.g., an image can be labeled as husky, dog, or even animal depending on the expertise of the annotator. In this work, we formalize these settings and…

To date, there has been no formal study of the statistical cost of interpretability in machine learning. As such, the discourse around potential trade-offs is often informal and misconceptions abound. In this work, we aim to initiate a…

In our recent work (Bubeck, Price, Razenshteyn, arXiv:1805.10204) we argued that adversarial examples in machine learning might be due to an inherent computational hardness of the problem. More precisely, we constructed a binary…

It is well-known that the statistical performance of Lasso can suffer significantly when the covariates of interest have strong correlations. In particular, the prediction error of Lasso becomes much worse than computationally inefficient…

In the recent years, branch-and-cut algorithms have been the target of data-driven approaches designed to enhance the decision making in different phases of the algorithm such as branching, or the choice of cutting planes (cuts). In…

We study the complexity of PAC learning halfspaces in the presence of Massart noise. In this problem, we are given i.i.d. labeled examples $(\mathbf{x}, y) \in \mathbb{R}^N \times \{ \pm 1\}$, where the distribution of $\mathbf{x}$ is…

We consider the problem of learning and using predictions for warm start algorithms with predictions. In this setting, an algorithm is given an instance of a problem, and a prediction of the solution. The runtime of the algorithm is bounded…

Inference problems with conjectured statistical-computational gaps are ubiquitous throughout modern statistics, computer science and statistical physics. While there has been success evidencing these gaps from the failure of restricted…

We consider the problem of mixed sparse linear regression with two components, where two real $k$-sparse signals $\beta_1, \beta_2$ are to be recovered from $n$ unlabelled noisy linear measurements. The sparsity is allowed to be sublinear…

It is usual to consider data protection and learnability as conflicting objectives. This is not always the case: we show how to jointly control inference --- seen as the attack --- and learnability by a noise-free process that mixes…

We provide a general framework for characterizing the trade-off between accuracy and robustness in supervised learning. We propose a method and define quantities to characterize the trade-off between accuracy and robustness for a given…

Robust learning in expressive languages with real-world data continues to be a challenging task. Numerous conventional methods appeal to heuristics without any assurances of robustness. While probably approximately correct (PAC) Semantics…

We informally call a stochastic process learnable if it admits a generalization error approaching zero in probability for any concept class with finite VC-dimension (IID processes are the simplest example). A mixture of learnable processes…

We introduce and study the computational problem of determining statistical similarity between probability distributions. For distributions $P$ and $Q$ over a finite sample space, their statistical similarity is defined as…

We study the problem of assessing the robustness of counterfactual explanations for deep learning models. We focus on $\textit{plausible model shifts}$ altering model parameters and propose a novel framework to reason about the robustness…

Equilibrium computation in markets usually considers settings where player valuation functions are known. We consider the setting where player valuations are unknown; using a PAC learning-theoretic framework, we analyze some classes of…

I prove that competitive market outcomes require computational intractability. If P = NP, firms can efficiently solve the collusion detection problem, identifying deviations from cooperative agreements in complex, noisy markets and thereby…

Clustering is a NP-hard problem. Thus, no optimal algorithm exists, heuristics are applied to cluster the data. Heuristics can be very resource-intensive, if not applied properly. For substantially large data sets computational efficiencies…