Finding Skewed Subcubes Under a Distribution

Say that we are given samples from a distribution ? over an n-dimensional space. We expect or desire ? to behave like a product distribution (or a k-wise independent distribution over its marginals for small k). We propose the problem of enumerating/list-decoding all large subcubes where the distribution ? deviates markedly from what we expect; we refer to such subcubes as skewed subcubes. Skewed subcubes are certificates of dependencies between small subsets of variables in ?. We motivate this problem by showing that it arises naturally in the context of algorithmic fairness and anomaly detection. In this work we focus on the special but important case where the space is the Boolean hypercube, and the expected marginals are uniform. We show that the obvious definition of skewed subcubes can lead to intractable list sizes, and propose a better definition of a minimal skewed subcube, which are subcubes whose skew cannot be attributed to a larger subcube that contains it. Our main technical contribution is a list-size bound for this definition and an algorithm to efficiently find all such subcubes. Both the bound and the algorithm rely on Fourier-analytic techniques, especially the powerful hypercontractive inequality. On the lower bounds side, we show that finding skewed subcubes is as hard as the sparse noisy parity problem, and hence our algorithms cannot be improved on substantially without a breakthrough on this problem which is believed to be intractable. Motivated by this, we study alternate models allowing query access to ? where finding skewed subcubes might be easier

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Metrics of Planar Graphs

We investigate the problem of approximate Nearest-Neighbor Search (NNS) in graphical metrics: The task is to preprocess an edge-weighted graph G=(V,E) on m vertices and a small "dataset" D subset V of size n << m, so that given a query point q in V, one can quickly approximate dist(q,D) (the distance from q to its closest vertex in D) and find a vertex a in D within this approximated distance. We assume the query algorithm has access to a distance oracle, that quickly evaluates the exact distance between any pair of vertices. For planar graphs G with maximum degree Delta, we show how to efficiently construct a compact data structure -- of size ~O(n(Delta+1/epsilon)) -- that answers (1+epsilon)-NNS queries in time ~O(Delta+1/epsilon). Thus, as far as NNS applications are concerned, metrics derived from bounded-degree planar graphs behave as low-dimensional metrics, even though planar metrics do not necessarily have a low doubling dimension, nor can they be embedded with low distortion into l_2. We complement our algorithmic result by lower bounds showing that the access to an exact distance oracle (rather than an approximate one) and the dependency on Delta (in query time) are both essential