Robust Statistics, Revisited - Aknur Moitra

Starting from the seminal works of Tukey (1960) and Huber (1962), the field of robust statistics asks: Are there estimators that provable work in the presence of noise? The trouble is that all known provably robust estimators are also hard to compute in high-dimensions.

Here, we study a basic problem in robust statistics, posed in various forms in the above works. Given corrupted samples from a high-dimensional Gaussian, are there efficient algorithms to accurately estimate its parameters? We give the first algorithms that are able to tolerate a constant fraction of corruptions that is independent of the dimension. Additionally, we give several more applications of our techniques to product distributions and various mixture models.