Lectures

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

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.