This paper studies the problem of \emph{entropy identity testing}: given sample access to a distribution $p$ and a fully described distribution $q$ (both are discrete distributions over the support of size $k$), and the promise that either $p = q$ or $ | H(p) - H(q) | \geqslant \varepsilon$, where $H(\cdot)$ denotes the Shannon entropy, a tester needs to distinguish between the two cases with high probability.

We study the fundamental problems of identity testing (goodness of fit), and closeness testing (two sample test) of distributions over k elements, under di erential privacy. While the problems have a long history in statistics, finite sample bounds for these problems have only been established recently. In this work, we derive upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of both the problems under (Á, ")-di erential privacy. We provide sample optimal algorithms for identity testing problem for all parameter ranges, and the first results for closeness testing. Our closeness testing bounds are optimal in the sparse regime where the number of samples is at most k.

This paper studies the problem of entropy identity testing: given sample access to a distribution p and a fully described distribution q (both discrete distributions over a domain of size k), and the promise that either p = q or |H (p) H (q)| ε, where H () denotes the Shannon entropy, a tester needs to distinguish between the two cases with high probability.

In this paper, we devise identity tests for ranking data that is generated from Mallows model both in the \emph{asymptotic} and \emph{non-asymptotic} settings. First we consider the case when the central ranking is known, and devise two algorithms for testing the spread parameter of the Mallows model. The first one is obtained by constructing a Uniformly Most Powerful Unbiased (UMPU) test in the asymptotic setting and then converting it into a sample-optimal non-asymptotic identity test. The resulting test is, however, impractical even for medium sized data, because it requires computing the distribution of the sufficient statistic. The second non-asymptotic test is derived from an optimal learning algorithm for the Mallows model. This test is both easy to compute and is sample-optimal for a wide range of parameters. Next, we consider testing Mallows models for the unknown central ranking case. This case can be tackled in the asymptotic setting by introducing a bias that exponentially decays with the sample size. We support all our findings with extensive numerical experiments and show that the proposed tests scale gracefully with the number of items to be ranked.

This paper studies the problem of entropy identity testing: given sample access to a distribution p and a fully described distribution q (both discrete distributions over a domain of size k), and the promise that either p = q or |H (p) H (q)| ε, where H () denotes the Shannon entropy, a tester needs to distinguish between the two cases with high probability.

We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions.

We construct two types of testers, exhibiting tradeoffs between sample complexity and computational complexity.