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We consider the variable selection problem for two-sample tests, aiming to select the most informative variables to determine whether two collections of samples follow the same distribution. To address this, we propose a novel framework…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-23 Jie Wang , Santanu S. Dey , Yao Xie

We propose a novel kernel-based two-sample test that leverages the spectral decomposition of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) statistic to identify and utilize well-estimated directional components in reproducing kernel Hilbert space…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-21 Rui Cui , Yuhao Li , Xiaojun Song

We explore the minimax optimality of goodness-of-fit tests on general domains using the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD). The KSD framework offers a flexible approach for goodness-of-fit testing, avoiding strong distributional…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-24 Omar Hagrass , Bharath Sriperumbudur , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian

Nonparametric tests via kernel embedding of distributions have witnessed a great deal of practical successes in recent years. However, statistical properties of these tests are largely unknown beyond consistency against a fixed alternative.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-10 Tong Li , Ming Yuan

Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a widely used kernel-based measure of discrepancy between probability measures. It is often employed in the scenario where a user has a collection of samples from a candidate probability measure and wishes…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-13 George Wynne , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Andrew B. Duncan

Goodness-of-fit testing is often criticized for its lack of practical relevance: since ``all models are wrong'', the null hypothesis that the data conform to our model is ultimately always rejected as the sample size grows. Despite this,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-24 Xing Liu , François-Xavier Briol

The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is a cornerstone statistic for nonparametric two-sample testing, but its test power is dictated entirely by the chosen kernel. Because any fixed kernel inherently fails to distinguish certain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Yijin Ni , Xiaoming Huo

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

We present a study of a kernel-based two-sample test statistic related to the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) in the manifold data setting, assuming that high-dimensional observations are close to a low-dimensional manifold. We characterize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-27 Xiuyuan Cheng , Yao Xie

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

Non-parametric goodness-of-fit testing procedures based on kernel Stein discrepancies (KSD) are promising approaches to validate general unnormalised distributions in various scenarios. Existing works focused on studying kernel choices to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-02 Wenkai Xu

We introduce a kernel-based two-sample test for comparing probability distributions up to group actions. Our construction yields invariant kernels for locally compact $\sigma$-compact groups and extends classical Haar-based approaches…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-18 Madison Giacofci , Anouar Meynaoui , Alex Podgorny

The widespread adoption of the \emph{maximum mean discrepancy} (MMD) in goodness-of-fit testing has spurred extensive research on its statistical performance. However, recent studies indicate that the inherent structure of MMD may constrain…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-11 Shiwei Sang , Shao-Bo Lin , Xuehu Zhu

Two-sample hypothesis testing-determining whether two sets of data are drawn from the same distribution-is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning with broad scientific applications. In the context of nonparametric testing,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Antoine Chatalic , Marco Letizia , Nicolas Schreuder , Lorenzo Rosasco

We consider nonparametric testing in a non-asymptotic framework. Our statistical guarantees are exact in the sense that Type I and II errors are controlled for any finite sample size. Meanwhile, one proposed test is shown to achieve minimax…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-02-07 Yun Yang , Zuofeng Shang , Guang Cheng

We investigate properties of goodness-of-fit tests based on the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD). We introduce a strategy to construct a test, called KSDAgg, which aggregates multiple tests with different kernels. KSDAgg avoids splitting the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-22 Antonin Schrab , Benjamin Guedj , Arthur Gretton

We propose novel statistics which maximise the power of a two-sample test based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), by adapting over the set of kernels used in defining it. For finite sets, this reduces to combining (normalised) MMD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Felix Biggs , Antonin Schrab , Arthur Gretton

We propose a nonparametric statistical test for goodness-of-fit: given a set of samples, the test determines how likely it is that these were generated from a target density function. The measure of goodness-of-fit is a divergence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Kacper Chwialkowski , Heiko Strathmann , Arthur Gretton

The paper introduces a new kernel-based Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistic for measuring the distance between two distributions given finitely-many multivariate samples. When the distributions are locally low-dimensional, the proposed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-03 Xiuyuan Cheng , Alexander Cloninger , Ronald R. Coifman

The kernel two-sample test based on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is one of the most popular methods for detecting differences between two distributions over general metric spaces. In this paper we propose a method to boost the power…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-06 Anirban Chatterjee , Bhaswar B. Bhattacharya