Distribution Testing: Hypothesis Testing from Very Little (or Very Private) Data
summary
Overview of concrete results: distribution testing under total-variation needs Θ(√k/ε²) samples for uniformity, and common reductions let many identity tests reduce to uniformity. Key tools are Poissonization to make counts independent, the collision-based tester and the complementary unique-elements / chi-squared statistics, plus a surprising workable empirical estimator for identity. For private data the talk maps central/local/shuffle models to tight sample bounds and uses shuffle amplification to turn local protocols into shuffle-private ones.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and preliminaries
- 3:43Defining property testing
- 5:44Properties and examples
- 15:05Testing vs. learning
- 21:03Hardness of uniformity testing
- 25:15Methodologies and tricks
- 32:51Uniformity testing algorithms
- 40:20Advanced testing techniques
- 57:04Differential privacy overview
- 1:03:49Private distribution testing
- 1:14:21Open problems and conclusion
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