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A set of high dimensional points X ={x1,x2,…,xn}⊆Rd in isotropic position is said to be δ -anti concentrated if for every direction v, the fraction of points in X satisfying |⟨xi,v⟩|⩽δ is at most O(δ). Motivated by applications to list-decodable learning and clustering, three recent works [7], [44], [71] considered the problem of constructing efficient certificates of anti-concentration in the average case, when the set of points X corresponds to samples from a Gaussian distribution. Their certificates played a crucial role in several subsequent works in algorithmic robust statistics on list-decodable learning and settling the robust learnability of arbitrary Gaussian mixtures. Unlike related efficient certificates of concentration properties that are known for wide class of distri-butions [52], the aforementioned approach has been limited only to rotationally invariant distributions (and their affine transformations) with the only prominent example being Gaussian distributions. This work presents a new (and arguably the most natural) formulation for anti- concentration. Using this formulation, we give quasi-polynomial time verifiable sum-of-squares certificates of anti-concentration that hold for a wide class of non-Gaussian distributions including anti-concentrated bounded product distributions and uniform distributions over Lp balls (and their affine transformations). Consequently, our method upgrades and extends results in algorithmic robust statistics e.g., list-decodable learning and clustering, to such distributions. As in the case of previous works, our certificates are also obtained via relaxations in the sum-of-squares hierarchy. However, the nature of our argument differs significantly from prior works that formulate anti-concentration as the non-negativity of an explicit polynomial. Our argument constructs a canonical integer program for anti-concentration and analysis a SoS relaxation of it, independent of the intended application. The explicit polynomials appearing in prior works can be seen as specific dual certificates to this program. From a technical standpoint, unlike existing works that explicitly construct sum-of-squares certificates, our argument relies on duality and analyzes a pseudo-expectation on large subsets of the input points that take a small value in some direction. Our analysis uses the method of polynomial reweightings to reduce the problem to analyzing only analytically dense or sparse directions. 

Kernel matrices, as well as weighted graphs represented by them, are ubiquitous objects in machine learning, statistics and other related fields. The main drawback of using kernel methods (learning and inference using kernel matrices) is efficiency – given n input points, most kernel-based algorithms need to materialize the full n × n kernel matrix before performing any subsequent computation, thus incurring Ω(n^2) runtime. Breaking this quadratic barrier for various problems has therefore, been a subject of extensive research efforts. We break the quadratic barrier and obtain subquadratic time algorithms for several fundamental linear-algebraic and graph processing primitives, including approximating the top eigenvalue and eigenvector, spectral sparsification, solving lin- ear systems, local clustering, low-rank approximation, arboricity estimation and counting weighted triangles. We build on the recently developed Kernel Density Estimation framework, which (after preprocessing in time subquadratic in n) can return estimates of row/column sums of the kernel matrix. In particular, we de- velop efficient reductions from weighted vertex and weighted edge sampling on kernel graphs, simulating random walks on kernel graphs, and importance sampling on matrices to Kernel Density Estimation and show that we can generate samples from these distributions in sublinear (in the support of the distribution) time. Our reductions are the central ingredient in each of our applications and we believe they may be of independent interest. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms on low-rank approximation (LRA) and spectral sparsi- fication, where we observe a 9x decrease in the number of kernel evaluations over baselines for LRA and a 41x reduction in the graph size for spectral sparsification.