Random Restrictions of High-Dimensional Distributions and Uniformity Testing with Subcube Conditioning

Abstract

We give a nearly-optimal algorithm for testing uniformity of distributions supported on $\{-1,1\}^n$, which makes $\tilde O (\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^2)$ queries to a subcube conditional sampling oracle (Bhattacharyya and Chakraborty (2018)). The key technical component is a natural notion of random restriction for distributions on $\{-1,1\}^n$, and a quantitative analysis of how such a restriction affects the mean vector of the distribution. Along the way, we consider the problem of mean testing with independent samples and provide a nearly-optimal algorithm.