Concise and Efficient Quantum Algorithms for Distribution Closeness Testing

Abstract

We study the impact of quantum computation on the fundamental problem of testing the property of distributions. In particular, we focus on testing whether two unknown classical distributions are close or far enough, and propose the currently best quantum algorithms for this problem under the metrics of $l^1$-distance and $l^2$-distance. Compared with the latest results given in \cite{gilyen2019distributional} which relied on the technique of quantum singular value transformation (QSVT), our algorithms not only have lower complexity, but also are more concise.