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Related papers: Boosting the Power of Kernel Two-Sample Tests

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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 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

Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) has been widely used in the areas of machine learning and statistics to quantify the distance between two distributions in the $p$-dimensional Euclidean space. The asymptotic property of the sample MMD has…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-08-29 Hanjia Gao , Xiaofeng Shao

The distribution closeness testing (DCT) assesses whether the distance between a distribution pair is at least $\epsilon$-far. Existing DCT methods mainly measure discrepancies between a distribution pair defined on discrete one-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Zhijian Zhou , Liuhua Peng , Xunye Tian , Feng Liu

Nonparametric two sample testing deals with the question of consistently deciding if two distributions are different, given samples from both, without making any parametric assumptions about the form of the distributions. The current…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-11-25 Aaditya Ramdas , Sashank J. Reddi , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh , Larry Wasserman

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 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

Two-sample tests have been extensively employed in various scientific fields and machine learning such as evaluation on the effectiveness of drugs and A/B testing on different marketing strategies to discriminate whether two sets of samples…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-27 Yu Terada , Yugo Ogio , Ken Arai , Hiroyuki Tezuka , Yu Tanaka

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Ho Chung Leon Law , Christopher Yau , Dino Sejdinovic

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Andrew Alden , Blanka Horvath , Zacharia Issa

Nonparametric two sample testing is a decision theoretic problem that involves identifying differences between two random variables without making parametric assumptions about their underlying distributions. We refer to the most common…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-08-05 Aaditya Ramdas , Sashank J. Reddi , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh , Larry Wasserman

Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) embedding of probability distributions has proved to be an effective approach, via MMD (maximum mean discrepancy), for nonparametric hypothesis testing problems involving distributions defined over…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-17 Soumya Mukherjee , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur

Two-sample and independence tests with the kernel-based MMD and HSIC have shown remarkable results on i.i.d. data and stationary random processes. However, these statistics are not directly applicable to non-stationary random processes, a…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-05 Felix Laumann , Julius von Kügelgen , Mauricio Barahona

To adapt kernel two-sample and independence testing to complex structured data, aggregation of multiple kernels is frequently employed to boost testing power compared to single-kernel tests. However, we observe a phenomenon that directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhijian Zhou , Xunye Tian , Liuhua Peng , Chao Lei , Antonin Schrab , Danica J. Sutherland , Feng Liu

This paper provides a unifying view of optimal kernel hypothesis testing across the MMD two-sample, HSIC independence, and KSD goodness-of-fit frameworks. Minimax optimal separation rates in the kernel and $L^2$ metrics are presented, with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-30 Antonin Schrab

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

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

A new goodness-of-fit test for normality in high-dimension (and Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space) is proposed. It shares common ideas with the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) it outperforms both in terms of computation time and applicability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-04-14 Jérémie Kellner , Alain Celisse