English

Second-Order Asymptotics of Hoeffding-Like Hypothesis Tests

Information Theory 2022-05-12 v1 math.IT

Abstract

We consider a binary statistical hypothesis testing problem, where nn independent and identically distributed random variables ZnZ^n are either distributed according to the null hypothesis PP or the alternate hypothesis QQ, and only PP is known. For this problem, a well-known test is the Hoeffding test, which accepts PP if the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the empirical distribution of ZnZ^n and PP is below some threshold. In this paper, we consider Hoeffding-like tests, where the KL divergence is replaced by other divergences, and characterize, for a large class of divergences, the first and second-order terms of the type-II error for a fixed type-I error. Since the considered class includes the KL divergence, we obtain the second-order term of the Hoeffiding test as a special case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.05631,
  title  = {Second-Order Asymptotics of Hoeffding-Like Hypothesis Tests},
  author = {K. V. Harsha and Jithin Ravi and Tobias Koch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.05631},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

26 pages. Submitted to the 2022 IEEE Information Theory Workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:14:33.103Z