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Distributional comparison is a fundamental problem in statistical data analysis with numerous applications in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. Numerous methods exist for distributional comparison but kernel Stein's method has…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-12 Xiaoda Qu , Baba C. Vemuri

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Wenbo Gong , Yingzhen Li , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Qingzhong Ai , Shiyu Liu , Lirong He , Zenglin Xu

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

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

How similar are two images? In computational pathology, where Whole Slide Images (WSIs) of digitally scanned tissue samples from patients can be multi-gigapixels in size, determination of degree of similarity between two WSIs is a…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-24 Piotr Keller , Muhammad Dawood , Fayyaz ul Amir Afsar Minhas

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

For two decades, reproducing kernels and their associated discrepancies have facilitated elegant theoretical analyses in the setting of quasi Monte Carlo. These same tools are now receiving interest in statistics and related fields, as…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-24 Chris. J. Oates

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 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

When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-07 Alessandro Barp , Francois-Xavier Briol , Andrew B. Duncan , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey

While likelihood-based inference and its variants provide a statistically efficient and widely applicable approach to parametric inference, their application to models involving intractable likelihoods poses challenges. In this work, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-06-17 Francois-Xavier Briol , Alessandro Barp , Andrew B. Duncan , Mark Girolami

The Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) is a kernel dependence measure that has applications in various aspects of machine learning. Conveniently, the objectives of different dimensionality reduction applications using HSIC often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-12 Chieh Wu , Jared Miller , Yale Chang , Mario Sznaier , Jennifer Dy

Kernel dependence measures yield accurate estimates of nonlinear relations between random variables, and they are also endorsed with solid theoretical properties and convergence rates. Besides, the empirical estimates are easy to compute in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-03 Adrián Pérez-Suay , Gustau Camps-Valls

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

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

Machine learning in computational pathology (CPath) often aggregates patch-level predictions from multi-gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) to generate WSI-level prediction scores for crucial tasks such as survival prediction and drug…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Piotr Keller , Muhammad Dawood , Brinder Singh Chohan , Fayyaz ul Amir Afsar Minhas

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a score-based discrepancy widely used in goodness-of-fit tests. It can be applied even when the target distribution has an unknown normalising factor, such as in Bayesian analysis. We show theoretically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-06 Xing Liu , Andrew B. Duncan , Axel Gandy

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-05 Moritz Melcher , Simon Weissmann , Ashia C. Wilson , Jakob Zech