26/08/2020

A Robust Univariate Mean Estimator is All You Need

Adarsh Prasad, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Pradeep Ravikumar

Keywords:

Abstract: We study the problem of designing estimators when the data has heavy-tails and is corrupted by outliers. In such an adversarial setup, we aim to design statistically optimal estimators for flexible non-parametric distribution classes such as distributions with bounded-2k moments and symmetric distributions. Our primary workhorse is a conceptually simple reduction from multivariate estimation to univariate estimation. Using this reduction, we design estimators which are optimal in both heavy-tailed and contaminated settings. Our estimators achieve an optimal dimension independent bias in the contaminated setting, while also simultaneously achieving high-probability error guarantees with optimal sample complexity. These results provide some of the first such estimators for a broad range of problems including Mean Estimation, Sparse Mean Estimation, Covariance Estimation, Sparse Covariance Estimation and Sparse PCA.

 0
 0
 0
 0
This is an embedded video. Talk and the respective paper are published at AISTATS 2020 virtual conference. If you are one of the authors of the paper and want to manage your upload, see the question "My papertalk has been externally embedded..." in the FAQ section.

Comments

Post Comment
no comments yet
code of conduct: tbd

Similar Papers