# News for January 2021

The first month of 2021 has brought with it 5 papers, covering graph testing, Boolean function testing, and distribution testing — as well as database theory. Let’s dive into it. Random walks and forbidden minors III: $$\mathrm{poly}(d/\varepsilon)$$-time partition oracles for minor-free graph classes, by Akash Kumar, C. Seshadhri, and Andrew Stolman (arXiv). Minor-closed bounded-degree graphs […]

# News for April 2020

April is now behind us, and we hope you and your families are all staying safe and healthy. We saw six seven property papers appear online last month, so at least there is some reading ahead of us! A mixture of privacy, quantum, high-dimensional distributions, and juntas (juntæ?). A lot of distribution testing, overall. Connecting […]

# News for November 2019

We hit the mother-lode of property testing papers this month. Stick with us, as we cover 10 (!) papers that appeared online in November. EDIT: We actually have 11 papers, check out Optimal Adaptive Detection of Monotone Patterns at the bottom. Testing noisy linear functions for sparsity, by Xue Chen, Anindya De, and Rocco A. […]

# 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 […]