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We establish existence of Stein kernels for probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^d$ satisfying a Poincar\'e inequality, and obtain bounds on the Stein discrepancy of such measures. Applications to quantitative central limit theorems are…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-03-09 Thomas A. Courtade , Max Fathi , Ashwin Pananjady

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

Existing two-sample testing techniques, particularly those based on choosing a kernel for the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), often assume equal sample sizes from the two distributions. Applying these methods in practice can require…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-17 Aaron Wei , Milad Jalali , Danica J. Sutherland

Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…

Computation · Statistics 2020-10-27 Matthew A. Fisher , Tui Nolan , Matthew M. Graham , Dennis Prangle , Chris J. Oates

Embedding probability distributions into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) has enabled powerful nonparametric methods such as the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), a statistical distance with strong theoretical and computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-28 Masha Naslidnyk , Siu Lun Chau , François-Xavier Briol , Krikamol Muandet

We propose a nonparametric two-sample test procedure based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) for testing the hypothesis that two samples of functions have the same underlying distribution, using kernels defined on function spaces. This…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-20 George Wynne , Andrew B. Duncan

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

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin

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

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Qingzhong Ai , Shiyu Liu , Lirong He , Zenglin Xu

Accurate approximation of probability measures is essential in numerical applications. This paper explores the quantization of probability measures using the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance as a guiding metric. We first investigate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Zahra Mehraban , Alois Pichler

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

Kernel methods provide a flexible and powerful framework for nonparametric statistical testing by embedding probability distributions into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In this work, we study the kernel two-sample testing…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-09 Perrine Lacroix , Bertrand Michel , Franck Picard , Vincent Rivoirard

Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has enjoyed a lot of success in many machine learning and statistical applications, including non-parametric hypothesis testing, because of its ability to handle non-Euclidean data. Recently, it has been…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-24 Omar Hagrass , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur , Bing Li

This paper introduces kdiff, a novel kernel-based measure for estimating distances between instances of time series, random fields and other forms of structured data. This measure is based on the idea of matching distributions that only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-01 Srinjoy Das , Hrushikesh Mhaskar , Alexander Cloninger

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

When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-07 Alessandro Barp , Francois-Xavier Briol , Andrew B. Duncan , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey

Kernel methods underpin many of the most successful approaches in data science and statistics, and they allow representing probability measures as elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space without loss of information. Recently, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-19 Florian Kalinke , Zoltan Szabo , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur

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

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