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I Believe in one God, and It's Not a Computer

Mother Jones

How the data center boom plunged one small Pennsylvania town into chaos. Valley View Estates is set to be surrounded by data centers. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. "I don't like to see anyone upset," said Nick Farris of Provident Real Estate Advisors. He was sitting in the front of a crowd of roughly 150 inside Valley View High School's auditorium in Archbald, a town of about 7,500, huddled between two mountain ranges in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna Valley. Farris was there to represent the developer for Project Scott, one of many data center campuses coming to town. "I think that this is the best data center site in this area of the country, by far." The audience had been fairly quiet, bundled in thick coats against the late January cold. But as Farris spoke about data centers as a boon for communities, they began to laugh, drawing a rebuke from town officials. "What about the children?" someone shouted from the crowd. The children were watching from the walls; long banners of Valley View Performing Arts students hanging around the auditorium like championship pennants. Project Scott and four other data facilities will sit just a few thousand feet from the middle and high schools. He was referring to Lockheed Martin's 350,000-square-foot Missiles and Fire Control facility directly next to the high school, parts of which are highly contaminated . "That sucks too!" another attendee yelled back.


Differentially Private Uniformly Most Powerful Tests for Binomial Data

Jordan Awan, Aleksandra Slavković

Neural Information Processing Systems

Furthermore, we obtain exactp-values, which are easily computed in terms of the Tulap random variable. We show that our results also apply to distribution-free hypothesis testsforcontinuous data.



A Locally Adaptive Normal Distribution

Georgios Arvanitidis, Lars K. Hansen, Søren Hauberg

Neural Information Processing Systems

The underlyingmetricis,however,non-parametric.Wedevelopamaximumlikelihood algorithm to infer the distribution parameters that relies on a combination of gradient descent and Monte Carlo integration. We further extend the LAND to mixture models, andprovidethecorresponding EMalgorithm.




An Information Theoretic Perspective on Conformal Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

More precisely, we prove three different ways to upper bound the intrinsic uncertainty, as described by the conditional entropy of the target variable given the inputs, by combining CP with information theoretical inequalities.




Locally Private Parametric Methods for Change-Point Detection

Yadav, Anuj Kumar, Cadir, Cemre, Shkel, Yanina, Gastpar, Michael

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study parametric change-point detection, where the goal is to identify distributional changes in time series, under local differential privacy. In the non-private setting, we derive improved finite-sample accuracy guarantees for a change-point detection algorithm based on the generalized log-likelihood ratio test, via martingale methods. In the private setting, we propose two locally differentially private algorithms based on randomized response and binary mechanisms, and analyze their theoretical performance. We derive bounds on detection accuracy and validate our results through empirical evaluation. Our results characterize the statistical cost of local differential privacy in change-point detection and show how privacy degrades performance relative to a non-private benchmark. As part of this analysis, we establish a structural result for strong data processing inequalities (SDPI), proving that SDPI coefficients for Rényi divergences and their symmetric variants (Jeffreys-Rényi divergences) are achieved by binary input distributions. These results on SDPI coefficients are also of independent interest, with applications to statistical estimation, data compression, and Markov chain mixing.