Testing convex truncation

Abstract

We study the basic statistical problem of testing whether normally distributed $n$-dimensional data has been truncated, i.e., altered by only retaining points that lie in some unknown truncation set $S\subseteq {\mathbb{R}}^n$. As our main algorithmic results,

1. we give an $O(n)$-sample algorithm that can distinguish the standard normal distribution $N(0,I_n)$ from $N(0,I_n)$ conditioned on an unknown and arbitrary convex set $S$;
2. we give a different $O(n)$-sample algorithm that can distinguish $N(0,I_n)$ from $N(0,I_n)$ conditioned on an unknown and arbitrary mixture of symmetric convex sets.

Both our algorithms are computationally efficient and run in $O(n^2)$ time, which is linear in the size of the input. These results stand in sharp contrast with known results for learning or testing convex bodies with respect to the normal distribution or learning convex-truncated normal distributions, where state-of-the-art algorithms require essentially $n^{O(\sqrt{n})}$ samples. An easy argument shows that no finite number of samples suffices to distinguish $N(0,I_n)$ from an unknown and arbitrary mixture of general (not necessarily symmetric) convex sets, so no common generalization of results (1) and (2) above is possible. We also prove that any algorithm (computationally efficient or otherwise) that can distinguish $N(0,I_n)$ from $N(0,I_n)$ conditioned on an unknown symmetric convex set must use $\Omega (n)$ samples. This shows that the sample complexity of each of our algorithms is optimal up to a constant factor.