Related papers: Theory and Applications of Kernel Stein's Method o…

This paper proposes and studies a numerical method for approximation of posterior expectations based on interpolation with a Stein reproducing kernel. Finite-sample-size bounds on the approximation error are established for posterior…

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…

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…

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…

Much of machine learning relies on comparing distributions with discrepancy measures. Stein's method creates discrepancy measures between two distributions that require only the unnormalized density of one and samples from the other. Stein…

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…

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…

Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a widely used kernel-based measure of discrepancy between probability measures. It is often employed in the scenario where a user has a collection of samples from a candidate probability measure and wishes…

Maximum mean discrepancies (MMDs) like the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) have grown central to a wide range of applications, including hypothesis testing, sampler selection, distribution approximation, and variational inference. In each…

We propose a new general version of Stein's method for univariate distributions. In particular we propose a canonical definition of the Stein operator of a probability distribution {which is based on a linear difference or differential-type…

In this paper we present a general framework for Stein's method for multivariate continuous distributions. The approach gives a collection of Stein characterisations, among which we highlight score-Stein operators and kernel Stein…

Non-parametric goodness-of-fit testing procedures based on kernel Stein discrepancies (KSD) are promising approaches to validate general unnormalised distributions in various scenarios. Existing works focused on studying kernel choices to…

The paper introduces a new kernel-based Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistic for measuring the distance between two distributions given finitely-many multivariate samples. When the distributions are locally low-dimensional, the proposed…

Manifold data analysis is challenging due to the lack of parametric distributions on manifolds. To address this, we introduce a series of Riemannian radial distributions on Riemannian symmetric spaces. By utilizing the symmetry, we show…

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…

Stein's method has been widely used to achieve distributional approximations for probability distributions defined in Euclidean spaces. Recently, techniques to extend Stein's method to manifold-valued random variables with distributions…

We propose a kernel-based nonparametric test of relative goodness of fit, where the goal is to compare two models, both of which may have unobserved latent variables, such that the marginal distribution of the observed variables is…

In many applications, we encounter data on Riemannian manifolds such as torus and rotation groups. Standard statistical procedures for multivariate data are not applicable to such data. In this study, we develop goodness-of-fit testing and…

This paper provides a general framework for Stein's density method for multivariate continuous distributions. The approach associates to any probability density function a canonical operator and Stein class, as well as an infinite…

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…