Corpus ID: 199551917

# A Fast Spectral Algorithm for Mean Estimation with Sub-Gaussian Rates

@article{Lei2019AFS,
title={A Fast Spectral Algorithm for Mean Estimation with Sub-Gaussian Rates},
author={Zhixian Lei and Kyle Luh and Prayaag Venkat and Fred Zhang},
journal={ArXiv},
year={2019},
volume={abs/1908.04468}
}
We study the algorithmic problem of estimating the mean of heavy-tailed random vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$, given $n$ i.i.d. samples. The goal is to design an efficient estimator that attains the optimal sub-gaussian error bound, only assuming that the random vector has bounded mean and covariance. Polynomial-time solutions to this problem are known but have high runtime due to their use of semi-definite programming (SDP). Conceptually, it remains open whether convex relaxation is truly necessary… Expand
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