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The Broader Landscape of Robustness in Algorithmic Statistics (arxiv.org)
1 point by sebg 163 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A survey of mean estimation shows how three kinds of robustness—resisting bad data points, extreme values in heavy-tailed data, and protecting privacy—share the same core tricks. Those shared ideas give fast, practical estimators in every setting, unlike methods built separately for each.

Abstract

The last decade has seen a number of advances in computationally efficient algorithms for statistical methods subject to robustness constraints. An estimator may be robust in a number of different ways: to contamination of the dataset, to heavy-tailed data, or in the sense that it preserves privacy of the dataset. We survey recent results in these areas with a focus on the problem of mean estimation, drawing technical and conceptual connections between the various forms of robustness, showing that the same underlying algorithmic ideas lead to computationally efficient estimators in all these settings.

Gautam Kamath
arXiv:2412.02670 · stat.ML, cs.CR, cs.DS, cs.IT, math.ST · submitted Dec 3, 2024 · updated Sep 5, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · To appear in IEEE BITS the Information Theory Magazine

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