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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-21 Raghav Singhal , Xintian Han , Saad Lahlou , Rajesh Ranganath

Counterfactual inference has become a ubiquitous tool in online advertisement, recommendation systems, medical diagnosis, and econometrics. Accurate modeling of outcome distributions associated with different interventions -- known as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-13 Krikamol Muandet , Motonobu Kanagawa , Sorawit Saengkyongam , Sanparith Marukatat

Quantifying the difference between probability distributions is crucial in machine learning. However, estimating statistical divergences from empirical samples is challenging due to unknown underlying distributions. This work proposes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Jhoan K. Hoyos-Osorio , Luis G. Sanchez-Giraldo

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

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

Detecting changes is of fundamental importance when analyzing data streams and has many applications, e.g., in predictive maintenance, fraud detection, or medicine. A principled approach to detect changes is to compare the distributions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Florian Kalinke , Marco Heyden , Georg Gntuni , Edouard Fouché , Klemens Böhm

When working in a high-risk setting, having well calibrated probabilistic predictive models is a crucial requirement. However, estimators for calibration error are not always able to correctly distinguish which model is better calibrated.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-18 Peter Moskvichev , Dino Sejdinovic

Kernel methods have been among the most popular techniques in machine learning, where learning tasks are solved using the property of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In this paper, we propose a novel data analysis framework with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-22 Yuka Hashimoto , Isao Ishikawa , Masahiro Ikeda , Fuyuta Komura , Takeshi Katsura , Yoshinobu Kawahara

Depth measures have gained popularity in the statistical literature for defining level sets in complex data structures like multivariate data, functional data, and graphs. Despite their versatility, integrating depth measures into…

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

This paper characterizes the maximum mean discrepancies (MMD) that metrize the weak convergence of probability measures for a wide class of kernels. More precisely, we prove that, on a locally compact, non-compact, Hausdorff space, the MMD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Alessandro Barp , Bernhard Schölkopf , Lester Mackey

With the widespread application of causal inference, it is increasingly important to have tools which can test for the presence of causal effects in a diverse array of circumstances. In this vein we focus on the problem of testing for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Jake Fawkes , Robert Hu , Robin J. Evans , Dino Sejdinovic

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discovery of causal relationships in a set of random variables is a fundamental objective of science and has also recently been argued as being an essential component towards real machine intelligence. One class of causal discovery…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-01 Tim Tse , Zhitang Chen , Shengyu Zhu , Yue Liu

The problem of estimating the kernel mean in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) is central to kernel methods in that it is used by classical approaches (e.g., when centering a kernel PCA matrix), and it also forms the core inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-05 Krikamol Muandet , Bharath Sriperumbudur , Bernhard Schölkopf