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Maximum mean discrepancies (MMDs) like the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) have grown central to a wide range of applications, including hypothesis testing, sampler selection, distribution approximation, and variational inference. In each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Alessandro Barp , Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey

In this article a new family of tests is proposed for the comparison problem of the equality of distribution of two-sample under right censoring scheme. The tests are based on energy distance and kernels mean embedding, are calibrated by…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-04 Marcos Matabuena

The two-sample hypothesis testing problem is studied for the challenging scenario of high dimensional data sets with small sample sizes. We show that the two-sample hypothesis testing problem can be posed as a one-class set classification…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Hamed Masnadi-Shirazi

The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a kernel-based nonparametric statistic for two-sample testing, whose inferential accuracy depends critically on variance characterization. Existing work provides various finite-sample estimators of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Shijie Zhong , Yikun Yang , Da Gong , Jiangfeng Fu

Two-sample and independence tests with the kernel-based MMD and HSIC have shown remarkable results on i.i.d. data and stationary random processes. However, these statistics are not directly applicable to non-stationary random processes, a…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-05 Felix Laumann , Julius von Kügelgen , Mauricio Barahona

Two-sample tests evaluate whether two samples are realizations of the same distribution (the null hypothesis) or two different distributions (the alternative hypothesis). We consider a new setting for this problem where sample features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Weizhi Li , Gautam Dasarathy , Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy , Visar Berisha

We propose a new one-sample test for normality in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Namely, we test the null-hypothesis of belonging to a given family of Gaussian distributions. Hence our procedure may be applied either to test…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-07-13 Jérémie Kellner , Alain Celisse

We propose a class of kernel-based two-sample tests, which aim to determine whether two sets of samples are drawn from the same distribution. Our tests are constructed from kernels parameterized by deep neural nets, trained to maximize test…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-15 Feng Liu , Wenkai Xu , Jie Lu , Guangquan Zhang , Arthur Gretton , Danica J. Sutherland

To adapt kernel two-sample and independence testing to complex structured data, aggregation of multiple kernels is frequently employed to boost testing power compared to single-kernel tests. However, we observe a phenomenon that directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhijian Zhou , Xunye Tian , Liuhua Peng , Chao Lei , Antonin Schrab , Danica J. Sutherland , Feng Liu

We present a novel neural network Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistic by identifying a new connection between neural tangent kernel (NTK) and MMD. This connection enables us to develop a computationally efficient and memory-efficient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-19 Xiuyuan Cheng , Yao Xie

We consider the problem of two-sample testing in a semi-supervised setting with abundant unlabeled covariate data. Standard two-sample tests neglect covariate information, which has the potential to significantly boost performance. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Gyumin Lee , Shubhanshu Shekhar , Ilmun Kim

Given $n$ observations from two balanced classes, consider the task of labeling an additional $m$ inputs that are known to all belong to \emph{one} of the two classes. Special cases of this problem are well-known: with complete knowledge of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-27 Patrik Róbert Gerber , Tianze Jiang , Yury Polyanskiy , Rui Sun

This paper provides a unifying view of optimal kernel hypothesis testing across the MMD two-sample, HSIC independence, and KSD goodness-of-fit frameworks. Minimax optimal separation rates in the kernel and $L^2$ metrics are presented, with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-30 Antonin Schrab

We propose a framework to construct practical kernel-based two-sample tests from the family of $f$-divergences. The test statistic is computed from the witness function of a regularized variational representation of the divergence, which we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-28 Mónica Ribero , Antonin Schrab , Arthur Gretton

We address the problem of A/B testing, a widely used protocol for evaluating the potential improvement achieved by a new decision system compared to a baseline. This protocol segments the population into two subgroups, each exposed to a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-16 Otmane Sakhi , Alexandre Gilotte , David Rohde

In kernel methods, the median heuristic has been widely used as a way of setting the bandwidth of RBF kernels. While its empirical performances make it a safe choice under many circumstances, there is little theoretical understanding of why…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-31 Damien Garreau , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Motonobu Kanagawa

Kernel embeddings of distributions and the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the resulting distance between distributions, are useful tools for fully nonparametric two-sample testing and learning on distributions. However, it is rarely that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Ho Chung Leon Law , Christopher Yau , Dino Sejdinovic

Multi-source and multi-modal datasets are increasingly common in scientific research, yet they often exhibit block-wise missingness, where entire modalities are systematically absent in some sources or no single source contains all…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-10 Kejian Zhang , Muxuan Liang , Robert Maile , Doudou Zhou

Over the last decade, an approach that has gained a lot of popularity to tackle nonparametric testing problems on general (i.e., non-Euclidean) domains is based on the notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embedding of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-03 Omar Hagrass , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur , Bing Li

We characterize the asymptotic performance of nonparametric one- and two-sample testing. The exponential decay rate or error exponent of the type-II error probability is used as the asymptotic performance metric, and an optimal test…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Shengyu Zhu , Biao Chen , Zhitang Chen , Pengfei Yang