Is Your Distribution in Shape? | Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture

In her recent Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture, Ronitt Rubinfeld (MIT) examines the sample complexity of property testing algorithms that seek to distinguish whether an underlying distribution satisfies basic shape properties. Examples of such properties include convexity, log-concavity, heavy tails, and approximability by k-histogram functions. This talk focuses on the property of monotonicity, as tools developed for distinguishing the monotonicity property have proved to be useful for all of the above properties as well as several others.