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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

We propose a framework for analyzing and comparing distributions, allowing us to design statistical tests to determine if two samples are drawn from different distributions. Our test statistic is the largest difference in expectations over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2008-05-16 Arthur Gretton , Karsten Borgwardt , Malte J. Rasch , Bernhard Scholkopf , Alexander J. Smola

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

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

Kernel methods are successful approaches for different machine learning problems. This success is mainly rooted in using feature maps and kernel matrices. Some methods rely on the eigenvalues/eigenvectors of the kernel matrix, while for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Nima Reyhani , Hideitsu Hino , Ricardo Vigario

Motivated by the increasing use of kernel-based metrics for high-dimensional and large-scale data, we study the asymptotic behavior of kernel two-sample tests when the dimension and sample sizes both diverge to infinity. We focus on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-31 Jian Yan , Xianyang Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-23 Jie Wang , Santanu S. Dey , Yao Xie

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

We derive novel concentration inequalities that bound the statistical error for a large class of stochastic optimization problems, focusing on the case of unbounded objective functions. Our derivations utilize the following key tools: 1) A…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-01 Jeremiah Birrell

We use a suitable version of the so-called "kernel trick" to devise two-sample (homogeneity) tests, especially focussed on high-dimensional and functional data. Our proposal entails a simplification related to the important practical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-04-24 Javier Cárcamo , Antonio Cuevas , Luis-Alberto Rodríguez

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

The paper presents new metrics to quantify and test for (i) the equality of distributions and (ii) the independence between two high-dimensional random vectors. We show that the energy distance based on the usual Euclidean distance cannot…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-01 Shubhadeep Chakraborty , Xianyang Zhang

Kernel mean embeddings are a popular tool that consists in representing probability measures by their infinite-dimensional mean embeddings in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. When the kernel is characteristic, mean embeddings can be used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Boris Muzellec , Francis Bach , Alessandro Rudi

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

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

We propose a series of computationally efficient nonparametric tests for the two-sample, independence, and goodness-of-fit problems, using the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), and Kernel Stein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-27 Antonin Schrab , Ilmun Kim , Benjamin Guedj , Arthur Gretton

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Anirban Chatterjee , Aaditya Ramdas

This paper introduces a kernel discrepancy-based framework for rerandomization to enhance the precision of causal inference in controlled experiments. We demonstrate that the kernel discrepancy is the key part of the variance upper bound…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-05 Yiou Li , Lulu Kang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Jonas M. Kübler , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Bernhard Schölkopf , Krikamol Muandet

Approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) offers the promise of more rapid sampling at the cost of more biased inference. Since standard MCMC diagnostics fail to detect these biases, researchers have developed computable Stein discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-16 Jackson Gorham , Lester Mackey