We introduce the Integrated Tsallis Combination (ITC), a hybrid impurity measure for decision tree learning that combines normalized Tsallis entropy with an exponential polarization component. While many existing measures sacrifice theoretical soundness for computational efficiency or vice versa, ITC provides a mathematically principled framework that balances both aspects. The core innovation lies in the complementarity between Tsallis entropy's information-theoretic foundations and the polarization component's sensitivity to distributional asymmetry. We establish key theoretical properties-concavity under explicit parameter conditions, proper boundary conditions, and connections to classical measures-and provide a rigorous justification for the hybridization strategy. Through an extensive comparative evaluation on seven benchmark datasets comparing 23 impurity measures with five-fold repetition, we show that simple parametric measures (Tsallis $α=0.5$) achieve the highest average accuracy ($91.17\%$), while ITC variants yield competitive results ($88.38-89.16\%$) with strong theoretical guarantees. Statistical analysis (Friedman test: $χ^2=3.89$, $p=0.692$) reveals no significant global differences among top performers, indicating practical equivalence for many applications. ITC's value resides in its solid theoretical grounding-proven concavity under suitable conditions, flexible parameterization ($α$, $β$, $γ$), and computational efficiency $O(K)$-making it a rigorous, generalizable alternative when theoretical guarantees are paramount. We provide guidelines for measure selection based on application priorities and release an open-source implementation to foster reproducibility and further research.

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new identification procedure that exploits the full gap matrix $Δ_{i,j}=q_{i,j}-\tfrac12$ (where $q_{i,j}$ is the probability that arm $i$ beats arm $j$), rather than only the gaps between the Condorcet winner and the other arms. We derive high-probability, instance-dependent sample-complexity guarantees that (up to logarithmic factors) improve the best known ones by leveraging informative comparisons beyond those involving the winner. We complement these results with new lower bounds which, to our knowledge, are the first for Condorcet-winner identification in stochastic dueling bandits. Our lower-bound analysis isolates the intrinsic cost of locating informative entries in the gap matrix and estimating them to the required confidence, establishing the optimality of our non-asymptotic bounds. Overall, our results reveal new regimes and trade-offs in the sample complexity that are not captured by asymptotic analyses based only on the expected budget.

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We study the fundamental problem of clustering $n$ points into $K$ groups drawn from a mixture of isotropic Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Specifically, we investigate the requisite minimal distance $Δ$ between mean vectors to partially recover the underlying partition. While the minimax-optimal threshold for $Δ$ is well-established, a significant gap exists between this information-theoretic limit and the performance of known polynomial-time procedures. Although this gap was recently characterized in the high-dimensional regime ($n \leq dK$), it remains largely unexplored in the moderate-dimensional regime ($n \geq dK$). In this manuscript, we address this regime by establishing a new low-degree polynomial lower bound for the moderate-dimensional case when $d \geq K$. We show that while the difficulty of clustering for $n \leq dK$ is primarily driven by dimension reduction and spectral methods, the moderate-dimensional regime involves more delicate phenomena leading to a "non-parametric rate". We provide a novel non-spectral algorithm matching this rate, shedding new light on the computational limits of the clustering problem in moderate dimension.

Models (SDMs) predict species across space from spatially explicit features.

Deep learning algorithms have recently gained significant attention due to their impressive performance.

The learner's goal is to identify the optimal arm