News for April 2019

After a quite slow month of March, things sped up quite significantly in April: six different papers, ranging from graph testing to function testing to quantum distribution testing! Update (05/04): We missed one. Seven! Junta correlation is testable, by Anindya De, Elchanan Mossel, and Joe Neeman (arXiv). Junta testing really has seen a lot of […]

News for January 2019

Minimax Testing of Identity to a Reference Ergodic Markov Chain, by Geoffrey Wolfer and Aryeh Kontorovich (arXiv). This work studies distributional identity testing on Markov chains from a single trajectory, as recently introduced by Daskalakis, Dikkala, and Gravin: we wish to test whether a Markov chain is equal to some reference chain, or far from […]

News for August 2018

Three papers this month close out Summer 2018. Test without Trust: Optimal Locally Private Distribution Testing, by Jayadev Acharya, Clément L. Canonne, Cody Freitag, and Himanshu Tyagi (arXiv). This work studies distribution testing in the local privacy model. While private distribution testing has recently been studied, requiring that the algorithm’s output is differentially private with […]

News for June 2018

The summer gets off to a flying start, with three property testing papers, spanning differential privacy, distribution testing, and juntas in Gaussian space! On closeness to $$k$$-wise uniformity, by Ryan O’Donnell and Yu Zhao (arXiv) In this paper, the authors consider the following structural question about probability distributions over the Boolean hypercube $$\{-1,1\}^n$$: ” what […]

News for May 2018

Six papers for May, including new models, hierarchy theorems, separation results, resolution of conjectures, and a lot more fun stuff. A lot of things to read this month! Lower Bounds for Tolerant Junta and Unateness Testing via Rejection Sampling of Graphs, by Amit Levi and Erik Waingarten (ECCC). This paper proves a number of new lower […]

News for February 2018

February had a flurry of conference deadlines, and they seem to have produced six papers for us to enjoy, including three on estimating symmetric properties of distributions. Locally Private Hypothesis Testing, by Or Sheffet (arXiv). We now have a very mature understanding of the sample complexity of distributional identity testing — given samples from a […]

News for April 2017

April was a busy month for property testing. A mixture of distribution testing, junta testing, Fourier transforms, matrix problems, and graph testing. Let’s go! (Update: thanks to Omri Ben Eliezer for correcting some errors in our post. Also, he pointed out that we missed posting about by a property testing paper by Gishboliner-Shapira that appeared […]

News for November 2016

November was quite eventful for property testing, with six exciting new results for you to peruse. Alice and Bob Show Distribution Testing Lower Bounds (They don’t talk to each other anymore.), by Eric Blais, Clément L. Canonne, and Tom Gur (ECCC). The authors examine distribution testing lower bounds through the lens of communication complexity, a-la […]

Distribution Testing: a short non-survey

The past years have witnessed a great deal of activity in the field of distribution testing— so much, in fact, that it has become a bit of a challenge to even keep track of what’s happening and what has already happened. While this blog post is not going to be a comprehensive (comprehensible, maybe?) survey or […]

News for July 2016

After a few slow months, property testing is back with a bang! This month we have a wide range on results ranging from classic problems like junta testing to new models of property testing. Tolerant Junta Testing and the Connection to Submodular Optimization and Function Isomorphism, by Eric Blais, Clément L. Canonne, Talya Eden, Amit […]