The minimax risk in testing the histogram of discrete distributions for uniformity under missing ball alternatives

We consider the problem of testing the fit of a discrete sample of items from many categories to the uniform distribution over the categories. As a class of alternative hypotheses, we consider the removal of an $\ell_p$ ball of radius $\epsilon$ around the uniform rate sequence for $p \leq 2$. We deliver a sharp characterization of the asymptotic minimax risk when $\epsilon \to 0$ as the number of samples and number of dimensions go to infinity, for testing based on the occurrences' histogram (number of absent categories, singletons, collisions, ...). For example, for $p=1$ and in the limit of a small expected number of samples $n$ compared to the number of categories $N$ (aka "sub-linear" regime), the minimax risk $R^*_\epsilon$ asymptotes to $2 \bar{\Phi}\left(n \epsilon^2/\sqrt{8N}\right) $, with $\bar{\Phi}(x)$ the normal survival function. Empirical studies over a range of problem parameters show that this estimate is accurate in finite samples, and that our test is significantly better than the chisquared test or a test that only uses collisions. Our analysis is based on the asymptotic normality of histogram ordinates, the equivalence between the minimax setting to a Bayesian one, and the reduction of a multi-dimensional optimization problem to a one-dimensional problem.