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Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) has been widely used in the areas of machine learning and statistics to quantify the distance between two distributions in the $p$-dimensional Euclidean space. The asymptotic property of the sample MMD has…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-08-29 Hanjia Gao , Xiaofeng Shao

Existing example-based prediction explanation methods often bridge test and training data points through the model's parameters or latent representations. While these methods offer clues to the causes of model predictions, they often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Mahtab Sarvmaili , Hassan Sajjad , Ga Wu

Nonparametric two-sample tests such as the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) are often used to detect differences between two distributions in machine learning applications. However, the majority of existing literature assumes that error-free…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-08 Ron Nafshi , Maggie Makar

We provide a unifying framework linking two classes of statistics used in two-sample and independence testing: on the one hand, the energy distances and distance covariances from the statistics literature; on the other, maximum mean…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-11-13 Dino Sejdinovic , Bharath Sriperumbudur , Arthur Gretton , Kenji Fukumizu

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Xiaoda Qu , Xiran Fan , Baba C. Vemuri

Testing the independence between two random variables $x$ and $y$ is an important problem in statistics and machine learning, where the kernel-based tests of independence is focused to address the study of dependence recently. The advantage…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-04-14 Wen-Yu Hua , Philip Reiss , Debashis Ghosh

Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-26 Jackson Gorham , Anant Raj , Lester Mackey

The Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) and its joint-independence extension $d\mathrm{HSIC}$ are degenerate $V$-statistics whose data-dependent weighted-$\chi^2$ null limits force a permutation calibration that multiplies the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-22 Felix Laumann , Zhaolu Liu , Mauricio Barahona

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

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-12 Alessandro Barp , Chris. J. Oates , Emilio Porcu , Mark Girolami

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-02 Wenkai Xu

We construct a Wasserstein gradient flow of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and study its convergence properties. The MMD is an integral probability metric defined for a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and serves as a metric on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-04 Michael Arbel , Anna Korba , Adil Salim , Arthur Gretton

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

We investigate the discrepancy principle for choosing smoothing parameters for kernel density estimation. The method is based on the distance between the empirical and estimated distribution functions. We prove some new positive and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-03-19 Thoralf Mildenberger

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

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

Distances between probability distributions are a key component of many statistical machine learning tasks, from two-sample testing to generative modeling, among others. We introduce a novel distance between measures that compares them…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Arturo Castellanos , Anna Korba , Pavlo Mozharovskyi , Hicham Janati

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

Modern data analyses frequently encounter settings where samples of variables are contaminated by measurement error. Ignoring measurement noise can substantially degrade statistical inference, while existing correction techniques are often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Ritwik Vashistha , Jeff M. Phillips , Abhra Sarkar , Arya Farahi