A Permutation-free Kernel Two-Sample Test

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Shekhar, Shubhanshu, Kim, Ilmun, Ramdas, Aaditya
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2022
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909784485134336
author Shekhar, Shubhanshu
Kim, Ilmun
Ramdas, Aaditya
author_facet Shekhar, Shubhanshu
Kim, Ilmun
Ramdas, Aaditya
contents 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 it has an intractable limiting distribution. Hence, to design a level-$α$ test, one usually selects the rejection threshold as the $(1-α)$-quantile of the permutation distribution. The resulting nonparametric test has finite-sample validity but suffers from large computational cost, since every permutation takes quadratic time. We propose the cross-MMD, a new quadratic-time MMD test statistic based on sample-splitting and studentization. We prove that under mild assumptions, the cross-MMD has a limiting standard Gaussian distribution under the null. Importantly, we also show that the resulting test is consistent against any fixed alternative, and when using the Gaussian kernel, it has minimax rate-optimal power against local alternatives. For large sample sizes, our new cross-MMD provides a significant speedup over the MMD, for only a slight loss in power.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_14908
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Permutation-free Kernel Two-Sample Test
Shekhar, Shubhanshu
Kim, Ilmun
Ramdas, Aaditya
Methodology
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
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 it has an intractable limiting distribution. Hence, to design a level-$α$ test, one usually selects the rejection threshold as the $(1-α)$-quantile of the permutation distribution. The resulting nonparametric test has finite-sample validity but suffers from large computational cost, since every permutation takes quadratic time. We propose the cross-MMD, a new quadratic-time MMD test statistic based on sample-splitting and studentization. We prove that under mild assumptions, the cross-MMD has a limiting standard Gaussian distribution under the null. Importantly, we also show that the resulting test is consistent against any fixed alternative, and when using the Gaussian kernel, it has minimax rate-optimal power against local alternatives. For large sample sizes, our new cross-MMD provides a significant speedup over the MMD, for only a slight loss in power.
title A Permutation-free Kernel Two-Sample Test
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14908