6 research outputs found
Noisy population recovery in polynomial time
In the noisy population recovery problem of Dvir et al., the goal is to learn
an unknown distribution on binary strings of length from noisy samples.
For some parameter , a noisy sample is generated by flipping
each coordinate of a sample from independently with probability
. We assume an upper bound on the size of the support of the
distribution, and the goal is to estimate the probability of any string to
within some given error . It is known that the algorithmic
complexity and sample complexity of this problem are polynomially related to
each other.
We show that for , the sample complexity (and hence the algorithmic
complexity) is bounded by a polynomial in , and
improving upon the previous best result of due to Lovett and Zhang.
Our proof combines ideas from Lovett and Zhang with a \emph{noise attenuated}
version of M\"{o}bius inversion. In turn, the latter crucially uses the
construction of \emph{robust local inverse} due to Moitra and Saks