Related papers: Targeted Separation and Convergence with Kernel Di…
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…
We provide a unifying framework linking two classes of statistics used in two-sample and independence testing: on the one hand, the energy distances and distance covariances from the statistics literature; on the other, maximum mean…
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…
We propose a novel method for measuring the discrepancy between a set of samples and a desired posterior distribution for Bayesian inference. Classical methods for assessing sample quality like the effective sample size are not appropriate…
The kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy~(MMD) is a popular multivariate distance metric between distributions that has found utility in two-sample testing. The usual kernel-MMD test statistic is a degenerate U-statistic under the null, and thus…
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…
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…
Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is a widely used concept in machine learning research which has gained popularity in recent years as a highly effective tool for comparing (finite-dimensional) distributions. Since it is designed as a…
Negative distance kernels $K(x,y) := - \|x-y\|$ were used in the definition of maximum mean discrepancies (MMDs) in statistics and lead to favorable numerical results in various applications. In particular, so-called slicing techniques for…
Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and…
The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) has been the state-of-the-art nonparametric test for tackling the two-sample problem. Its statistic is given by the difference in expectations of the witness function, a real-valued function defined as a…
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…
Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…
The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is a widely used multivariate distance metric for two-sample testing. The standard MMD test statistic has an intractable null distribution typically requiring costly resampling or permutation approaches…
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…
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…
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…
We propose a kernel-based nonparametric test of relative goodness of fit, where the goal is to compare two models, both of which may have unobserved latent variables, such that the marginal distribution of the observed variables is…
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…
This paper proposes and studies a numerical method for approximation of posterior expectations based on interpolation with a Stein reproducing kernel. Finite-sample-size bounds on the approximation error are established for posterior…