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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

We propose a method to optimize the representation and distinguishability of samples from two probability distributions, by maximizing the estimated power of a statistical test based on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). This optimized MMD…

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

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

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

Likelihood-free inference methods typically make use of a distance between simulated and real data. A common example is the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), which has previously been used for approximate Bayesian computation, minimum…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-11 Ayush Bharti , Masha Naslidnyk , Oscar Key , Samuel Kaski , François-Xavier Briol

Do two data samples come from different distributions? Recent studies of this fundamental problem focused on embedding probability distributions into sufficiently rich characteristic Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHSs), to compare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-03 Somayeh Danafar , Paola M. V. Rancoita , Tobias Glasmachers , Kevin Whittingstall , Juergen Schmidhuber

The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a kernel-based distance between probability distributions useful in many applications (Gretton et al. 2012), bearing a simple estimator with pleasing computational and statistical properties. Being able…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Danica J. Sutherland , Namrata Deka

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

Representing, comparing, and measuring the distance between probability distributions is a key task in computational statistics and machine learning. The choice of representation and the associated distance determine properties of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-26 Masha Naslidnyk

Recent years have seen a surge in methods for two-sample testing, among which the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) test has emerged as an effective tool for handling complex and high-dimensional data. Despite its success and widespread…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-21 Ikjun Choi , Ilmun Kim

The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a recently proposed test statistic for two-sample test. Its quadratic time complexity, however, greatly hampers its availability to large-scale applications. To accelerate the MMD calculation, in this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-19 Ji Zhao , Deyu Meng

We consider training a deep neural network to generate samples from an unknown distribution given i.i.d. data. We frame learning as an optimization minimizing a two-sample test statistic---informally speaking, a good generator network…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-05-18 Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Daniel M. Roy , Zoubin Ghahramani

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 introduce a method, MMD-B-Fair, to learn fair representations of data via kernel two-sample testing. We find neural features of our data where a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) test cannot distinguish between representations of different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-26 Namrata Deka , Danica J. Sutherland

Covariate shifts are a common problem in predictive modeling on real-world problems. This paper proposes addressing the covariate shift problem by minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistics between the training and test sets in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Liwen Ouyang , Aaron Key

Motivated by the increasing use of kernel-based metrics for high-dimensional and large-scale data, we study the asymptotic behavior of kernel two-sample tests when the dimension and sample sizes both diverge to infinity. We focus on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-31 Jian Yan , Xianyang Zhang

Modern large-scale kernel-based tests such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) optimize kernel hyperparameters on a held-out sample via data splitting to obtain the most powerful test statistics. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Jonas M. Kübler , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Bernhard Schölkopf , Krikamol Muandet

Modern data analyses frequently encounter settings where samples of variables are contaminated by measurement error. Ignoring measurement noise can substantially degrade statistical inference, while existing correction techniques are often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Ritwik Vashistha , Jeff M. Phillips , Abhra Sarkar , Arya Farahi

In many contemporary statistical and machine learning methods, one needs to optimize an objective function that depends on the discrepancy between two probability distributions. The discrepancy can be referred to as a metric for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Yijin Ni , Xiaoming Huo