Quantum Sub-Gaussian Mean Estimator

Abstract: We present a new quantum algorithm for estimating the mean of a real-valued random variable obtained as the output of a quantum computation. Our estimator achieves a nearly-optimal quadratic speedup over the number of classical i.i.d. samples needed to estimate the mean of a heavy-tailed distribution with a sub-Gaussian error rate. This result subsumes (up to logarithmic factors) earlier works on the mean estimation problem that were not optimal for heavy-tailed distributions [BHMT02,BDGT11], or that require prior information on the variance [Hein02,Mon15,HM19]. As an application, we obtain new quantum algorithms for the $(\epsilon,\delta)$-approximation problem with an optimal dependence on the coefficient of variation of the input random variable.