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Communication Lower Bounds for Statistical Estimation Problems via a Distributed Data Processing Inequality
We study the tradeoff between the statistical error and communication cost of
distributed statistical estimation problems in high dimensions. In the
distributed sparse Gaussian mean estimation problem, each of the machines
receives data points from a -dimensional Gaussian distribution with
unknown mean which is promised to be -sparse. The machines
communicate by message passing and aim to estimate the mean . We
provide a tight (up to logarithmic factors) tradeoff between the estimation
error and the number of bits communicated between the machines. This directly
leads to a lower bound for the distributed \textit{sparse linear regression}
problem: to achieve the statistical minimax error, the total communication is
at least , where is the number of observations that
each machine receives and is the ambient dimension. These lower results
improve upon [Sha14,SD'14] by allowing multi-round iterative communication
model. We also give the first optimal simultaneous protocol in the dense case
for mean estimation.
As our main technique, we prove a \textit{distributed data processing
inequality}, as a generalization of usual data processing inequalities, which
might be of independent interest and useful for other problems.Comment: To appear at STOC 2016. Fixed typos in theorem 4.5 and incorporated
reviewers' suggestion
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