Under the auspices of the Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF)

REPORTS > KEYWORD > DISTRIBUTION TESTING:
Reports tagged with distribution testing:
TR12-154 | 31st October 2012
Sourav Chakraborty, Eldar Fischer, Yonatan Goldhirsh, Arie Matsliah

#### On the Power of Conditional Samples in Distribution Testing

Revisions: 1

In this paper we define and examine the power of the conditional-sampling oracle in the context of distribution-property testing. The conditional-sampling oracle for a discrete distribution $\mu$ takes as input a subset $S \subset [n]$ of the domain, and outputs a random sample $i \in S$ drawn according to $\mu$, ... more >>>

TR13-111 | 17th August 2013
Gregory Valiant, Paul Valiant

#### Instance-by-instance optimal identity testing

We consider the problem of verifying the identity of a distribution: Given the description of a distribution over a discrete support $p=(p_1,p_2,\ldots,p_n)$, how many samples (independent draws) must one obtain from an unknown distribution, $q$, to distinguish, with high probability, the case that $p=q$ from the case that the total ... more >>>

TR14-156 | 26th November 2014
Jayadev Acharya, Clement Canonne, Gautam Kamath

#### A Chasm Between Identity and Equivalence Testing with Conditional Queries

Revisions: 2

A recent model for property testing of probability distributions enables tremendous savings in the sample complexity of testing algorithms, by allowing them to condition the sampling on subsets of the domain.
In particular, Canonne et al. showed that, in this setting, testing identity of an unknown distribution $D$ (i.e., ... more >>>

TR15-063 | 15th April 2015
Clement Canonne

#### A Survey on Distribution Testing: Your Data is Big. But is it Blue?

Revisions: 1

The field of property testing originated in work on program checking, and has evolved into an established and very active research area. In this work, we survey the developments of one of its most recent and prolific offspring, distribution testing. This subfield, at the junction of property testing and Statistics, ... more >>>

TR16-015 | 4th February 2016
Oded Goldreich

#### The uniform distribution is complete with respect to testing identity to a fixed distribution

Revisions: 3

Inspired by Diakonikolas and Kane (2016), we reduce the class of problems consisting of testing whether an unknown distribution over $[n]$ equals a fixed distribution to this very problem when the fixed distribution is uniform over $[n]$. Our reduction preserves the parameters of the problem, which are $n$ and the ... more >>>

TR16-074 | 9th May 2016
Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane

#### A New Approach for Testing Properties of Discrete Distributions

We study problems in distribution property testing:
we want to determine whether they have some global property or are $\epsilon$-far
from having the property in $\ell_1$ distance (equivalently, total variation distance, or statistical distance'').
In this work, we give a ... more >>>

TR16-168 | 2nd November 2016
Eric Blais, Clement Canonne, Tom Gur

#### Alice and Bob Show Distribution Testing Lower Bounds (They don't talk to each other anymore.)

Revisions: 1

We present a new methodology for proving distribution testing lower bounds, establishing a connection between distribution testing and the simultaneous message passing (SMP) communication model. Extending the framework of Blais, Brody, and Matulef [BBM12], we show a simple way to reduce (private-coin) SMP problems to distribution testing problems. This method ... more >>>

TR16-177 | 11th November 2016
Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Alistair Stewart

#### Statistical Query Lower Bounds for Robust Estimation of High-dimensional Gaussians and Gaussian Mixtures

Revisions: 1

We prove the first {\em Statistical Query lower bounds} for two fundamental high-dimensional learning problems involving Gaussian distributions: (1) learning Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), and (2) robust (agnostic) learning of a single unknown mean Gaussian. In particular, we show a {\em super-polynomial gap} between the (information-theoretic) sample complexity and the ... more >>>

TR17-006 | 15th December 2016
Constantinos Daskalakis, Nishanth Dikkala, Gautam Kamath

#### Testing Ising Models

Revisions: 2

Given samples from an unknown multivariate distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ is the product of its marginals versus $p$ being far from every product distribution? Similarly, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ equals a given distribution $q$ versus $p$ and $q$ being far from each ... more >>>

TR17-075 | 29th April 2017
Clement Canonne, Ilias Diakonikolas, Alistair Stewart

#### Fourier-Based Testing for Families of Distributions

Revisions: 1

We study the general problem of testing whether an unknown discrete distribution belongs to a given family of distributions. More specifically, given a class of distributions $\mathcal{P}$ and sample access to an unknown distribution $\mathbf{P}$, we want to distinguish (with high probability) between the case that $\mathbf{P} \in \mathcal{P}$ and ... more >>>

TR17-132 | 7th September 2017
Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Alistair Stewart

#### Sharp Bounds for Generalized Uniformity Testing

We study the problem of {\em 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, with probability at least $2/3$, between the case that $p$ is uniform on some {\em subset} of $\mathbf{\Omega}$ ... more >>>

TR17-133 | 7th September 2017
Ilias Diakonikolas, Themis Gouleakis, John Peebles, Eric Price

#### Sample-Optimal Identity Testing with High Probability

We study the problem of testing identity against a given distribution (a.k.a. goodness-of-fit) 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 parameters $0< \epsilon, \delta < 1$, we wish to distinguish, {\em ... more >>>

TR17-155 | 13th October 2017
Alessandro Chiesa, Tom Gur

#### Proofs of Proximity for Distribution Testing

Revisions: 1

Distribution testing is an area of property testing that studies algorithms that receive few samples from a probability distribution D and decide whether D has a certain property or is far (in total variation distance) from all distributions with that property. Most natural properties of distributions, however, require a large ... more >>>

TR18-002 | 31st December 2017
Constantinos Daskalakis, Gautam Kamath, John Wright

#### Which Distribution Distances are Sublinearly Testable?

Given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ and a description of a distribution $q$, are $p$ and $q$ close or far? This question of "identity testing" has received significant attention in the case of testing whether $p$ and $q$ are equal or far in total variation distance. However, in recent ... more >>>

TR18-079 | 19th April 2018
Jayadev Acharya, Clement Canonne, Himanshu Tyagi

#### Distributed Simulation and Distributed Inference

Revisions: 1

Independent samples from an unknown probability distribution $\mathbf{p}$ on a domain of size $k$ are distributed across $n$ players, with each player holding one sample. Each player can communicate $\ell$ bits to a central referee in a simultaneous message passing (SMP) model of communication to help the referee infer a ... more >>>

TR18-131 | 17th July 2018
Gautam Kamath, Christos Tzamos

#### Anaconda: A Non-Adaptive Conditional Sampling Algorithm for Distribution Testing

In the conditional sampling model, the algorithm is given the following access to a distribution: it submits a query set $S$ to an oracle, which returns a sample from the distribution conditioned on being from $S$.
In the non-adaptive setting, ... more >>>

TR19-088 | 16th June 2019
Oded Goldreich

#### On the Complexity of Estimating the Effective Support Size

Loosely speaking, the effective support size of a distribution is the size of the support of a distribution that is close to it (in totally variation distance).
We study the complexity of estimating the effective support size of an unknown distribution when given samples of the distributions as well ... more >>>

TR19-098 | 20th July 2019
Jayadev Acharya, Clement Canonne, Yanjun Han, Ziteng Sun, Himanshu Tyagi

#### Domain Compression and its Application to Randomness-Optimal Distributed Goodness-of-Fit

We study goodness-of-fit of discrete distributions in the distributed setting, where samples are divided between multiple users who can only release a limited amount of information about their samples due to various information constraints. Recently, a subset of the authors showed that having access to a common random seed (i.e., ... more >>>

TR19-165 | 18th November 2019
Clement Canonne, Xi Chen, Gautam Kamath, Amit Levi, Erik Waingarten

#### Random Restrictions of High-Dimensional Distributions and Uniformity Testing with Subcube Conditioning

We give a nearly-optimal algorithm for testing uniformity of distributions supported on $\{-1,1\}^n$, which makes $\tilde O (\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^2)$ queries to a subcube conditional sampling oracle (Bhattacharyya and Chakraborty (2018)). The key technical component is a natural notion of random restriction for distributions on $\{-1,1\}^n$, and a quantitative analysis of how ... more >>>

TR20-058 | 24th April 2020
Shafi Goldwasser, Guy Rothblum, Jonathan Shafer, Amir Yehudayoff

#### Interactive Proofs for Verifying Machine Learning

We consider the following question: using a source of labeled data and interaction with an untrusted prover, what is the complexity of verifying that a given hypothesis is "approximately correct"? We study interactive proof systems for PAC verification, where a verifier that interacts with a prover is required to accept ... more >>>

TR20-062 | 29th April 2020
Clement Canonne, Karl Wimmer

#### Testing Data Binnings

Motivated by the question of data quantization and "binning," we revisit the problem of identity testing of discrete probability distributions. Identity testing (a.k.a. one-sample testing), a fundamental and by now well-understood problem in distribution testing, asks, given a reference distribution (model) $\mathbf{q}$ and samples from an unknown distribution $\mathbf{p}$, both ... more >>>

ISSN 1433-8092 | Imprint