This is the tentative lecture schedule, with links to scribe notes.
Lecture 1 (10 Sep) | Introduction. Property testing problem formulation. |
Lecture 2 (15 Sep) | Concentration inequalities |
Lecture 3 (17 Sep) | Concentration inequalities + Median of Means |
Lecture 4 (22 Sep) | List monotonicity in Hamming and l1 distance |
Lecture 5 (24 Sep) | Bounded degree graph -- connectedness + estimating # connected components |
Lecture 6 (29 Sep) | More on bounded degree graphs, biclique testing in dense graphs |
Lecture 7 (1 Oct) | Dense graph -- bipartiteness |
Lecture 8 (6 Oct) | Dense graph -- triangle freeness |
Lecture 9 (8 Oct) | PCP Theorem statement, Connections to (in)approximability |
Lecture 10 (13 Oct) | Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma + Statement of Kirszbraun's extension theorem |
Lecture 11 (15 Oct) | Distinguishing (discrete) distributions, Various statistical distances |
Lecture 12 (20 Oct) | Learning a discrete distribution in linear samples, upper and lower bound |
Lecture 13 (22 Oct) | Uniformity testing + Lower bound of Omega(sqrt(n)) |
Lecture 14 (27 Oct) | Identity testing -- chi^2-tester, upper bound via Poissonisation. Related closeness testers. |
Lecture 15 (29 Oct) | Instance optimal testing. Tolerant testing and relations with estimating parameters. Other models: Sampling correction + Brief intro to robust statistics |
No lecture (3 Nov) | Presidential Election Day |
Lecture 16 (5 Nov) | Streaming algorithms setup. Reservoir sampling. Majority element. |
Lecture 17 (10 Nov) | Count-Distinct Problem -- Deterministic exact lower bound + Algorithm |
Lecture 18 (12 Nov) | k-wise independence hashing |
Lecture 19 (17 Nov) | Count-Min sketch |
Lecture 20 (19 Nov) | Frequency moments |
Lecture 21 (24 Nov) | New mean estimation result |
No lecture (26 Nov) | Thanksgiving break |
Lecture 22 (1 Dec) | Miscellaneous topics/discussions |
Lecture 23 (3 Dec) | Miscellaneous topics/discussions |
Scribing is an important part of learning in this course, and constitutes 20% of the course grade. Students should submit the first draft of their scribe notes no later than 2 days after the corresponding lecture.
Submitted scribe notes should be typeset using this template.