Related papers: Using Perturbation to Improve Goodness-of-Fit Test…

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…

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…

Goodness-of-fit testing is often criticized for its lack of practical relevance: since ``all models are wrong'', the null hypothesis that the data conform to our model is ultimately always rejected as the sample size grows. Despite this,…

Generalized Bayesian Inference (GBI) provides a flexible framework for updating prior distributions using various loss functions instead of the traditional likelihoods, thereby enhancing the model robustness to model misspecification.…

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…

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…

Goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests are fundamental for assessing model adequacy. Score-based tests are appealing because they require fitting the model only once under the null. However, extending them to powerful nonparametric alternatives is…

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…

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…

Knowing the error distribution is important in many multivariate time series applications. To alleviate the risk of error distribution mis-specification, testing methodologies are needed to detect whether the chosen error distribution is…

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…

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…

In many fields, data appears in the form of direction (unit vector) and usual statistical procedures are not applicable to such directional data. In this study, we propose non-parametric goodness-of-fit testing procedures for general…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This article provides a practical introduction to kernel discrepancies, focusing on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), and the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD). Various estimators for these…

A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…