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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Yijin Ni , Xiaoming Huo

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 novel neural network Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistic by identifying a new connection between neural tangent kernel (NTK) and MMD. This connection enables us to develop a computationally efficient and memory-efficient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-19 Xiuyuan Cheng , Yao Xie

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

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 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

A family of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) kernel two-sample tests is introduced. Members of the test family are called Block-tests or B-tests, since the test statistic is an average over MMDs computed on subsets of the samples. The choice…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-11 Wojciech Zaremba , Arthur Gretton , Matthew Blaschko

Kernel two-sample tests have been widely used, and the development of efficient methods for high-dimensional, large-scale data is receiving increasing attention in the big data era. However, existing methods, such as the maximum mean…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-03 Hoseung Song , Hao Chen

We establish quantitative rates of convergence for the empirical estimation of probability measures by means of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) with power kernel $K_q(x,y) = -|x-y|^q$, $q \in (0,2)$. The resulting discrepancy is the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Francesco Colasanto , Matteo Focardi , Massimo Fornasier , Francesco Mattesini

Covariate shifts are a common problem in predictive modeling on real-world problems. This paper proposes addressing the covariate shift problem by minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistics between the training and test sets in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Liwen Ouyang , Aaron Key

Kernel techniques are among the most popular and flexible approaches in data science allowing to represent probability measures without loss of information under mild conditions. The resulting mapping called mean embedding gives rise to a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-27 Linda Chamakh , Zoltan Szabo

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Jonas M. Kübler , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Bernhard Schölkopf , Krikamol Muandet

Several researchers have proposed minimisation of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a method to quantise probability measures, i.e., to approximate a target distribution by a representative point set. We consider sequential algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-15 Onur Teymur , Jackson Gorham , Marina Riabiz , Chris. J. Oates

We propose a method to optimize the representation and distinguishability of samples from two probability distributions, by maximizing the estimated power of a statistical test based on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). This optimized MMD…

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) 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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Danica J. Sutherland , Namrata Deka