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Computational Implications of Reducing Data to Sufficient Statistics

Computation 2015-07-31 v3 Information Theory Machine Learning math.IT

Abstract

Given a large dataset and an estimation task, it is common to pre-process the data by reducing them to a set of sufficient statistics. This step is often regarded as straightforward and advantageous (in that it simplifies statistical analysis). I show that -on the contrary- reducing data to sufficient statistics can change a computationally tractable estimation problem into an intractable one. I discuss connections with recent work in theoretical computer science, and implications for some techniques to estimate graphical models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1409.3821,
  title  = {Computational Implications of Reducing Data to Sufficient Statistics},
  author = {Andrea Montanari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.3821},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:55:34.844Z