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We present a general framework for hypothesis testing on distributions of sets of individual examples. Sets may represent many common data sources such as groups of observations in time series, collections of words in text or a batch of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-03 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Alessandro Barp , Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey

A new computationally efficient dependence measure, and an adaptive statistical test of independence, are proposed. The dependence measure is the difference between analytic embeddings of the joint distribution and the product of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-18 Wittawat Jitkrittum , Zoltan Szabo , Arthur Gretton

Two-sample hypothesis testing-determining whether two sets of data are drawn from the same distribution-is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning with broad scientific applications. In the context of nonparametric testing,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Antoine Chatalic , Marco Letizia , Nicolas Schreuder , Lorenzo Rosasco

We propose novel statistics which maximise the power of a two-sample test based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), by adapting over the set of kernels used in defining it. For finite sets, this reduces to combining (normalised) MMD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Felix Biggs , Antonin Schrab , Arthur Gretton

The kernel two-sample test based on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is one of the most popular methods for detecting differences between two distributions over general metric spaces. In this paper we propose a method to boost the power…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-06 Anirban Chatterjee , Bhaswar B. Bhattacharya

We propose a nonparametric two-sample test procedure based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) for testing the hypothesis that two samples of functions have the same underlying distribution, using kernels defined on function spaces. This…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-20 George Wynne , Andrew B. Duncan

Two-sample tests have been extensively employed in various scientific fields and machine learning such as evaluation on the effectiveness of drugs and A/B testing on different marketing strategies to discriminate whether two sets of samples…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-27 Yu Terada , Yugo Ogio , Ken Arai , Hiroyuki Tezuka , Yu Tanaka

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-03 Antonin Schrab

We propose novel kernel-based tests for assessing the equivalence between distributions. Traditional goodness-of-fit testing is inappropriate for concluding the absence of distributional differences, because failure to reject the null…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 Xing Liu , Axel Gandy

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-03 Xiuyuan Cheng , Alexander Cloninger , Ronald R. Coifman

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

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

We consider the two-group classification problem and propose a kernel classifier based on the optimal scoring framework. Unlike previous approaches, we provide theoretical guarantees on the expected risk consistency of the method. We also…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-01 Alexander F. Lapanowski , Irina Gaynanova

We propose a new one-sample test for normality in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Namely, we test the null-hypothesis of belonging to a given family of Gaussian distributions. Hence our procedure may be applied either to test…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-07-13 Jérémie Kellner , Alain Celisse

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

Testing the dependency between two random variables is an important inference problem in statistics since many statistical procedures rely on the assumption that the two samples are independent. To test whether two samples are independent,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jin-Ting Zhang , Tianming Zhu

Dependence measures based on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, also known as Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and denoted HSIC, are widely used to statistically decide whether or not two random vectors are dependent. Recently,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-01-13 Mélisande Albert , Béatrice Laurent , Amandine Marrel , Anouar Meynaoui

The kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy~(MMD) is a popular multivariate distance metric between distributions that has found utility in two-sample testing. The usual kernel-MMD test statistic is a degenerate U-statistic under the null, and thus…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-16 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Ilmun Kim , Aaditya Ramdas

Nonparametric tests via kernel embedding of distributions have witnessed a great deal of practical successes in recent years. However, statistical properties of these tests are largely unknown beyond consistency against a fixed alternative.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-10 Tong Li , Ming Yuan