hypothesis testing problem
High-Dimensional Gaussian Mean Estimation under Realizable Contamination
Diakonikolas, Ilias, Kane, Daniel M., Pittas, Thanasis
We study mean estimation for a Gaussian distribution with identity covariance in $\mathbb{R}^d$ under a missing data scheme termed realizable $ฮต$-contamination model. In this model an adversary can choose a function $r(x)$ between 0 and $ฮต$ and each sample $x$ goes missing with probability $r(x)$. Recent work Ma et al., 2024 proposed this model as an intermediate-strength setting between Missing Completely At Random (MCAR) -- where missingness is independent of the data -- and Missing Not At Random (MNAR) -- where missingness may depend arbitrarily on the sample values and can lead to non-identifiability issues. That work established information-theoretic upper and lower bounds for mean estimation in the realizable contamination model. Their proposed estimators incur runtime exponential in the dimension, leaving open the possibility of computationally efficient algorithms in high dimensions. In this work, we establish an information-computation gap in the Statistical Query model (and, as a corollary, for Low-Degree Polynomials and PTF tests), showing that algorithms must either use substantially more samples than information-theoretically necessary or incur exponential runtime. We complement our SQ lower bound with an algorithm whose sample-time tradeoff nearly matches our lower bound. Together, these results qualitatively characterize the complexity of Gaussian mean estimation under $ฮต$-realizable contamination.
Statistical-ComputationalTradeoffs inHigh-DimensionalSingleIndex Models
We study the statistical-computational tradeoffs in a high dimensional single index modelY = f(X>ฮฒ)+, where f is unknown,X is a Gaussian vector and ฮฒ is s-sparse with unit norm. WhenCov(Y,X>ฮฒ) 6= 0, [43] shows that the direction and support ofฮฒ can be recovered using a generalized version of Lasso.
Hypothesis Testing for Generalized Thurstone Models
In this work, we develop a hypothesis testing framework to determine whether pairwise comparison data is generated by an underlying \emph{generalized Thurstone model} $\mathcal{T}_F$ for a given choice function $F$. While prior work has predominantly focused on parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification for such models, we address the fundamental problem of minimax hypothesis testing for $\mathcal{T}_F$ models. We formulate this testing problem by introducing a notion of separation distance between general pairwise comparison models and the class of $\mathcal{T}_F$ models. We then derive upper and lower bounds on the critical threshold for testing that depend on the topology of the observation graph. For the special case of complete observation graphs, this threshold scales as $ฮ((nk)^{-1/2})$, where $n$ is the number of agents and $k$ is the number of comparisons per pair. Furthermore, we propose a hypothesis test based on our separation distance, construct confidence intervals, establish time-uniform bounds on the probabilities of type I and II errors using reverse martingale techniques, and derive minimax lower bounds using information-theoretic methods. Finally, we validate our results through experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.
On robust hypothesis testing with respect to Hellinger distance
We study the hypothesis testing problem where the observed samples need not come from either of the specified hypotheses (distributions). In such a situation, we would like our test to be robust to this misspecification and output the distribution closer in Hellinger distance. If the underlying distribution is close to being equidistant from the hypotheses, then this would not be possible. Our main result is quantifying how close the underlying distribution has to be to either of the hypotheses. We also study the composite testing problem, where each hypothesis is a Hellinger ball around a fixed distribution. A generalized likelihood ratio test is known to work for this problem. We give an alternate test for the same.