# News for November 2017

A quiet month, with only two papers. Perhaps the calm before the storm? Please let us know in the comments if something slipped under our radar.

Agreement tests on graphs and hypergraphs, by Irit Dinur, Yuval Filmus, and Prahladh Harsha (ECCC). This work looks at agreement tests and agreement theorems, which argue that if one checks if a number of local functions agree, then there exists a global function which agrees with most of them. This work extends previous work on direct product testing to local functions of higher degree, which corresponds to agreement tests on graphs and hypergraphs.

Testing Conditional Independence of Discrete Distributions, by Clément L. Canonne, Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel M. Kane, and Alistair Stewart (arXiv). This paper focuses on testing whether a bivariate discrete distribution has independent marginals, conditioned on the value of a tertiary discrete random variable. More precisely, given realizations of $$(X, Y, Z)$$, test if $$X \perp Y \mid Z$$. Unconditional independence testing (corresponding to the case when $$Z$$ is constant) has been extensively studied by the community, with tight upper and lower bounds showing that the sample complexity has two regimes, depending on the tradeoff between the support size and the accuracy desired. This paper shows gives upper and lower bounds for this more general problem, showing a rich landscape depending on the relative value of the parameters.