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We derive a new discrepancy statistic for measuring differences between two probability distributions based on combining Stein's identity with the reproducing kernel Hilbert space theory. We apply our result to test how well a probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-07-04 Qiang Liu , Jason D. Lee , Michael I. Jordan

Model misspecification can create significant challenges for the implementation of probabilistic models, and this has led to development of a range of robust methods which directly account for this issue. However, whether these more…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-22 Oscar Key , Arthur Gretton , François-Xavier Briol , Tamara Fernandez

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

This paper formally derives the asymptotic distribution of a goodness-of-fit test based on the Kernel Stein Discrepancy introduced in (Oscar Key et al., "Composite Goodness-of-fit Tests with Kernels", Journal of Machine Learning Research…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Florian Brück , Veronika Reimoser , Fabian Baier

Complex data are often represented as a graph, which in turn can often be viewed as a realisation of a random graph, such as an inhomogeneous random graph model (IRG). For general fast goodness-of-fit tests in high dimensions, kernelised…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-02 Anum Fatima , Gesine Reinert

We propose novel kernel-based tests for assessing the equivalence between distributions. Traditional goodness-of-fit testing is inappropriate for concluding the absence of distributional differences, because failure to reject the null…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 Xing Liu , Axel Gandy

Distributional approximation is a fundamental problem in machine learning with numerous applications across all fields of science and engineering and beyond. The key challenge in most approximation methods is the need to tackle the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Xiaoda Qu , Xiran Fan , Baba C. Vemuri

Computable Stein discrepancies have been deployed for a variety of applications, ranging from sampler selection in posterior inference to approximate Bayesian inference to goodness-of-fit testing. Existing convergence-determining Stein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-12 Jonathan H. Huggins , Lester Mackey

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) have emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying goodness-of-fit over the last decade, featuring numerous successful applications. To the best of our knowledge, all existing KSD estimators with known rate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jose Cribeiro-Ramallo , Agnideep Aich , Florian Kalinke , Ashit Baran Aich , Zoltán Szabó

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) are widely used for goodness-of-fit testing, but standard KSDs can be insensitive to higher-order dependence features such as tail dependence. We introduce the Copula-Stein Discrepancy (CSD), which defines…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-13 Agnideep Aich , Ashit Baran Aich

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a non-parametric inference algorithm that evolves a set of particles to fit a given distribution of interest. We analyze the non-asymptotic properties of SVGD, showing that there exists a set of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Qiang Liu , Dilin Wang

Distributional comparison is a fundamental problem in statistical data analysis with numerous applications in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. Numerous methods exist for distributional comparison but kernel Stein's method has…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-12 Xiaoda Qu , Baba C. Vemuri

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

Score-based kernelised Stein discrepancy (KSD) tests have emerged as a powerful tool for the goodness of fit tests, especially in high dimensions; however, the test performance may depend on the choice of kernels in an underlying…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-13 Moritz Weckbecker , Wenkai Xu , Gesine Reinert

A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-05 Moritz Melcher , Simon Weissmann , Ashia C. Wilson , Jakob Zech

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) measure the quality of a distributional approximation and can be computed even when the target density has an intractable normalizing constant. Notable applications include the diagnosis of approximate MCMC…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Heishiro Kanagawa , Alessandro Barp , Arthur Gretton , Lester Mackey

We characterize the asymptotic performance of nonparametric goodness of fit testing. The exponential decay rate of the type-II error probability is used as the asymptotic performance metric, and a test is optimal if it achieves the maximum…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-19 Shengyu Zhu , Biao Chen , Pengfei Yang , Zhitang Chen

We propose a novel adaptive test of goodness-of-fit, with computational cost linear in the number of samples. We learn the test features that best indicate the differences between observed samples and a reference model, by minimizing the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-25 Wittawat Jitkrittum , Wenkai Xu , Zoltan Szabo , Kenji Fukumizu , Arthur Gretton

Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-17 Clémentine Chazal , Heishiro Kanagawa , Zheyang Shen , Anna Korba , Chris. J. Oates

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