Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tang, Yin, Ma, Yanyuan, Li, Bing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26775
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909881640943616
author Tang, Yin
Ma, Yanyuan
Li, Bing
author_facet Tang, Yin
Ma, Yanyuan
Li, Bing
contents We conduct a KL-divergence based procedure for testing elliptical distributions. The procedure simultaneously takes into account the two defining properties of an elliptically distributed random vector: independence between length and direction, and uniform distribution of the direction. The test statistic is constructed based on the $k$ nearest neighbors ($k$NN) method, and two cases are considered where the mean vector and covariance matrix are known and unknown. First-order asymptotic properties of the test statistic are rigorously established by creatively utilizing sample splitting, truncation and transformation between Euclidean space and unit sphere, while avoiding assuming Fréchet differentiability of any functionals. Debiasing and variance inflation are further proposed to treat the degeneration of the influence function. Numerical implementations suggest better size and power performance than the state of the art procedures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26775
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A KL-divergence based test for elliptical distribution
Tang, Yin
Ma, Yanyuan
Li, Bing
Methodology
We conduct a KL-divergence based procedure for testing elliptical distributions. The procedure simultaneously takes into account the two defining properties of an elliptically distributed random vector: independence between length and direction, and uniform distribution of the direction. The test statistic is constructed based on the $k$ nearest neighbors ($k$NN) method, and two cases are considered where the mean vector and covariance matrix are known and unknown. First-order asymptotic properties of the test statistic are rigorously established by creatively utilizing sample splitting, truncation and transformation between Euclidean space and unit sphere, while avoiding assuming Fréchet differentiability of any functionals. Debiasing and variance inflation are further proposed to treat the degeneration of the influence function. Numerical implementations suggest better size and power performance than the state of the art procedures.
title A KL-divergence based test for elliptical distribution
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26775