In nonparametric independence testing, we observe i.i.d.\ data $\{(X_i,Y_i)\}_{i=1}^n$, where $X \in \mathcal{X}, Y \in \mathcal{Y}$ lie in any general spaces, and we wish to test the null that $X$ is independent of $Y$. Modern test statistics such as the kernel Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) and Distance Covariance (dCov) have intractable null distributions due to the degeneracy of the underlying U-statistics. Thus, in practice, one often resorts to using permutation testing, which provides a nonasymptotic guarantee at the expense of recalculating the quadratic-time statistics (say) a few hundred times. This paper provides a simple but nontrivial modification of HSIC and dCov (called xHSIC and xdCov, pronounced ``cross'' HSIC/dCov) so that they have a limiting Gaussian distribution under the null, and thus do not require permutations. This requires building on the newly developed theory of cross U-statistics by Kim and Ramdas (2020), and in particular developing several nontrivial extensions of the theory in Shekhar et al. (2022), which developed an analogous permutation-free kernel two-sample test. We show that our new tests, like the originals, are consistent against fixed alternatives, and minimax rate optimal against smooth local alternatives. Numerical simulations demonstrate that compared to the full dCov or HSIC, our variants have the same power up to a $\sqrt 2$ factor, giving practitioners a new option for large problems or data-analysis pipelines where computation, not sample size, could be the bottleneck.

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-$\alpha$ test, one usually selects the rejection threshold as the $(1-\alpha)$-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.

Classical asymptotic theory for statistical inference usually involves calibrating a statistic by fixing the dimension $d$ while letting the sample size $n$ increase to infinity. Recently, much effort has been dedicated towards understanding how these methods behave in high-dimensional settings, where $d$ and $n$ both increase to infinity together. This often leads to different inference procedures, depending on the assumptions about the dimensionality, leaving the practitioner in a bind: given a dataset with 100 samples in 20 dimensions, should they calibrate by assuming $n \gg d$, or $d/n \approx 0.2$? This paper considers the goal of dimension-agnostic inference; developing methods whose validity does not depend on any assumption on $d$ versus $n$. We introduce an approach that uses variational representations of existing test statistics along with sample splitting and self-normalization to produce a new test statistic with a Gaussian limiting distribution, regardless of how $d$ scales with $n$. The resulting statistic can be viewed as a careful modification of degenerate U-statistics, dropping diagonal blocks and retaining off-diagonal blocks. We exemplify our technique for some classical problems including one-sample mean and covariance testing, and show that our tests have minimax rate-optimal power against appropriate local alternatives. In most settings, our cross U-statistic matches the high-dimensional power of the corresponding (degenerate) U-statistic up to a $\sqrt{2}$ factor.

Testing the significance of a variable or group of variables $X$ for predicting a response $Y$, given additional covariates $Z$, is a ubiquitous task in statistics. A simple but common approach is to specify a linear model, and then test whether the regression coefficient for $X$ is non-zero. However, when the model is misspecified, the test may have poor power, for example when $X$ is involved in complex interactions, or lead to many false rejections. In this work we study the problem of testing the model-free null of conditional mean independence, i.e. that the conditional mean of $Y$ given $X$ and $Z$ does not depend on $X$. We propose a simple and general framework that can leverage flexible nonparametric or machine learning methods, such as additive models or random forests, to yield both robust error control and high power. The procedure involves using these methods to perform regressions, first to estimate a form of projection of $Y$ on $X$ and $Z$ using one half of the data, and then to estimate the expected conditional covariance between this projection and $Y$ on the remaining half of the data. While the approach is general, we show that a version of our procedure using spline regression achieves what we show is the minimax optimal rate in this nonparametric testing problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in terms of maintaining Type I error control, and power, compared to several existing approaches.

最佳运输（OT）及其熵正则后代最近在机器学习和AI域中获得了很多关注。特别地，最优传输已被用于在概率分布之间开发概率度量。我们在本文中介绍了基于熵正常的最佳运输的独立性标准。我们的标准可用于测试两个样本之间的独立性。我们为测试统计制定非渐近界，研究其在零和替代假设下的统计行为。我们的理论结果涉及来自U-Process理论和最佳运输理论的工具。我们在现有的基准上提出了实验结果，说明了所提出的标准的兴趣。

We propose a framework for analyzing and comparing distributions, which we use to construct statistical tests to determine if two samples are drawn from different distributions. Our test statistic is the largest difference in expectations over functions in the unit ball of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and is called the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). We present two distributionfree tests based on large deviation bounds for the MMD, and a third test based on the asymptotic distribution of this statistic. The MMD can be computed in quadratic time, although efficient linear time approximations are available. Our statistic is an instance of an integral probability metric, and various classical metrics on distributions are obtained when alternative function classes are used in place of an RKHS. We apply our two-sample tests to a variety of problems, including attribute matching for databases using the Hungarian marriage method, where they perform strongly. Excellent performance is also obtained when comparing distributions over graphs, for which these are the first such tests.

基于内核的测试提供了一个简单而有效的框架，该框架使用繁殖内核希尔伯特空间的理论设计非参数测试程序。在本文中，我们提出了新的理论工具，可用于在几种数据方案以及许多不同的测试问题中研究基于内核测试的渐近行为。与当前的方法不同，我们的方法避免使用冗长的$ u $和$ v $统计信息扩展并限制定理，该定理通常出现在文献中，并直接与希尔伯特空格上的随机功能合作。因此，我们的框架会导致对内核测试的简单明了的分析，只需要轻度的规律条件。此外，我们表明，通常可以通过证明我们方法所需的规律条件既足够又需要进行必要的规律条件来改进我们的分析。为了说明我们的方法的有效性，我们为有条件的独立性测试问题提供了一项新的内核测试，以及针对已知的基于内核测试的新分析。

我们使用最大平均差异（MMD），Hilbert Schmidt独立标准（HSIC）和内核Stein差异（KSD），，提出了一系列针对两样本，独立性和合适性问题的计算效率，非参数测试，用于两样本，独立性和合适性问题。分别。我们的测试统计数据是不完整的$ u $统计信息，其计算成本与与经典$ u $ u $统计测试相关的样本数量和二次时间之间的线性时间之间的插值。这三个提出的测试在几个内核带宽上汇总，以检测各种尺度的零件：我们称之为结果测试mmdagginc，hsicagginc和ksdagginc。对于测试阈值，我们得出了一个针对野生引导不完整的$ U $ - 统计数据的分位数，该统计是独立的。我们得出了MMDagginc和Hsicagginc的均匀分离率，并准确量化了计算效率和可实现速率之间的权衡：据我们所知，该结果是基于不完整的$ U $统计学的测试新颖的。我们进一步表明，在二次时间案例中，野生引导程序不会对基于更广泛的基于置换的方法进行测试功率，因为​​两者都达到了相同的最小最佳速率（这反过来又与使用Oracle分位数的速率相匹配）。我们通过数值实验对计算效率和测试能力之间的权衡进行数字实验来支持我们的主张。在三个测试框架中，我们观察到我们提出的线性时间聚合测试获得的功率高于当前最新线性时间内核测试。

由于基于内核的度量越来越多的高维和大规模数据，我们研究了尺寸和样本尺寸偏向到无穷大的核心两样测试的渐近行为。我们专注于具有k（x，y）= f（\ | x，y）= f（\ | x | _ {2} ^ {2} / \ gamma）$的核心的最大平均差异（mmd），包括MMD与高斯内核和拉普拉斯内核，以及能源距离作为特殊情况。我们基于其中建立了零假假设和本地和固定替代方案下的中央极限定理（CLT）的内核两样统计的渐近扩展。新的非空CLT结果允许我们执行渐近确切的功率分析，这揭示了可以通过内核两样测试和维度和样本订单来检测的片刻差异之间的微妙相互作用。渐近理论通过数值研究进一步证实。我们的研究结果补充了最近文学中的人，并在使用内核两样测试的高维和大规模数据中的新光线。

本文研究了基于Laplacian Eigenmaps（Le）的基于Laplacian EIGENMAPS（PCR-LE）的主要成分回归的统计性质，这是基于Laplacian Eigenmaps（Le）的非参数回归的方法。 PCR-LE通过投影观察到的响应的向量$ {\ bf y} =（y_1，\ ldots，y_n）$ to to changbood图表拉普拉斯的某些特征向量跨越的子空间。我们表明PCR-Le通过SoboLev空格实现了随机设计回归的最小收敛速率。在设计密度$ P $的足够平滑条件下，PCR-le达到估计的最佳速率（其中已知平方$ l ^ 2 $ norm的最佳速率为$ n ^ { - 2s /（2s + d） ）} $）和健美的测试（$ n ^ { - 4s /（4s + d）$）。我们还表明PCR-LE是\ EMPH {歧管Adaptive}：即，我们考虑在小型内在维度$ M $的歧管上支持设计的情况，并为PCR-LE提供更快的界限Minimax估计（$ n ^ { - 2s /（2s + m）$）和测试（$ n ^ { - 4s /（4s + m）$）收敛率。有趣的是，这些利率几乎总是比图形拉普拉斯特征向量的已知收敛率更快;换句话说，对于这个问题的回归估计的特征似乎更容易，统计上讲，而不是估计特征本身。我们通过经验证据支持这些理论结果。

在本文中，我们提出了一种多个内核测试程序，以推断几个因素（例如不同的治疗组，性别，病史）及其相互作用同时引起了人们的兴趣。我们的方法能够处理复杂的数据，并且当假设诸如相称性不能合理时，可以看作是无所不在的COX模型的替代方法。我们的方法结合了来自生存分析，机器学习和多次测试的众所周知的概念：加权的对数秩检验，内核方法和多个对比度测试。这样，可以检测到超出经典比例危害设置以外的复杂危险替代方案。此外，通过充分利用单个测试程序的依赖性结构以避免功率损失来进行多个比较。总的来说，这为阶乘生存设计提供了灵活而强大的程序，其理论有效性通过Martingale论证和$ v $统计的理论证明。我们在广泛的仿真研究中评估了方法的性能，并通过真实的数据分析对其进行了说明。

广义贝叶斯推理使用损失函数而不是可能性的先前信仰更新，因此可以用于赋予鲁棒性，以防止可能的错误规范的可能性。在这里，我们认为广泛化的贝叶斯推论斯坦坦差异作为损失函数的损失，由应用程序的可能性含有难治性归一化常数。在这种情况下，斯坦因差异来避免归一化恒定的评估，并产生封闭形式或使用标准马尔可夫链蒙特卡罗的通用后出版物。在理论层面上，我们显示了一致性，渐近的正常性和偏见 - 稳健性，突出了这些物业如何受到斯坦因差异的选择。然后，我们提供关于一系列棘手分布的数值实验，包括基于内核的指数家庭模型和非高斯图形模型的应用。

我们在右审查的生存时间和协变量之间介绍一般的非参数独立测试，这可能是多变量的。我们的测试统计数据具有双重解释，首先是潜在无限的重量索引日志秩检验的超级索引，具有属于函数的再现内核HILBERT空间（RKHS）的重量函数;其次，作为某些有限措施的嵌入差异的规范，与Hilbert-Schmidt独立性标准（HSIC）测试统计类似。我们研究了测试的渐近性质，找到了足够的条件，以确保我们的测试在任何替代方案下正确拒绝零假设。可以直截了当地计算测试统计，并且通过渐近总体的野外自注程序进行拒绝阈值。对模拟和实际数据的广泛调查表明，我们的测试程序通常比检测复杂的非线性依赖的竞争方法更好。

概率分布之间的差异措施，通常被称为统计距离，在概率理论，统计和机器学习中普遍存在。为了在估计这些距离的距离时，对维度的诅咒，最近的工作已经提出了通过带有高斯内核的卷积在测量的分布中平滑局部不规则性。通过该框架的可扩展性至高维度，我们研究了高斯平滑$ P $ -wassersein距离$ \ mathsf {w} _p ^ {（\ sigma）} $的结构和统计行为，用于任意$ p \ GEQ 1 $。在建立$ \ mathsf {w} _p ^ {（\ sigma）} $的基本度量和拓扑属性之后，我们探索$ \ mathsf {w} _p ^ {（\ sigma）}（\ hat {\ mu} _n，\ mu）$，其中$ \ hat {\ mu} _n $是$ n $独立观察的实证分布$ \ mu $。我们证明$ \ mathsf {w} _p ^ {（\ sigma）} $享受$ n ^ { - 1/2} $的参数经验融合速率，这对比$ n ^ { - 1 / d} $率对于未平滑的$ \ mathsf {w} _p $ why $ d \ geq 3 $。我们的证明依赖于控制$ \ mathsf {w} _p ^ {（\ sigma）} $ by $ p $ th-sting spoollow sobolev restion $ \ mathsf {d} _p ^ {（\ sigma）} $并导出限制$ \ sqrt {n} \，\ mathsf {d} _p ^ {（\ sigma）}（\ hat {\ mu} _n，\ mu）$，适用于所有尺寸$ d $。作为应用程序，我们提供了使用$ \ mathsf {w} _p ^ {（\ sigma）} $的两个样本测试和最小距离估计的渐近保证，使用$ p = 2 $的实验使用$ \ mathsf {d} _2 ^ {（\ sigma）} $。

我们研究了随机近似程序，以便基于观察来自ergodic Markov链的长度$ n $的轨迹来求近求解$ d -dimension的线性固定点方程。我们首先表现出$ t _ {\ mathrm {mix}} \ tfrac {n}} \ tfrac {n}} \ tfrac {d}} \ tfrac {d} {n} $的非渐近性界限。$ t _ {\ mathrm {mix $是混合时间。然后，我们证明了一种在适当平均迭代序列上的非渐近实例依赖性，具有匹配局部渐近最小的限制的领先术语，包括对参数$的敏锐依赖（d，t _ {\ mathrm {mix}}） $以高阶术语。我们将这些上限与非渐近Minimax的下限补充，该下限是建立平均SA估计器的实例 - 最优性。我们通过Markov噪声的政策评估导出了这些结果的推导 - 覆盖了所有$ \ lambda \中的TD（$ \ lambda $）算法，以便[0,1）$ - 和线性自回归模型。我们的实例依赖性表征为HyperParameter调整的细粒度模型选择程序的设计开放了门（例如，在运行TD（$ \ Lambda $）算法时选择$ \ lambda $的值）。

We provide results that exactly quantify how data augmentation affects the convergence rate and variance of estimates. They lead to some unexpected findings: Contrary to common intuition, data augmentation may increase rather than decrease the uncertainty of estimates, such as the empirical prediction risk. Our main theoretical tool is a limit theorem for functions of randomly transformed, high-dimensional random vectors. The proof draws on work in probability on noise stability of functions of many variables. The pathological behavior we identify is not a consequence of complex models, but can occur even in the simplest settings -- one of our examples is a ridge regressor with two parameters. On the other hand, our results also show that data augmentation can have real, quantifiable benefits.

Over the last decade, an approach that has gained a lot of popularity to tackle non-parametric testing problems on general (i.e., non-Euclidean) domains is based on the notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embedding of probability distributions. The main goal of our work is to understand the optimality of two-sample tests constructed based on this approach. First, we show that the popular MMD (maximum mean discrepancy) two-sample test is not optimal in terms of the separation boundary measured in Hellinger distance. Second, we propose a modification to the MMD test based on spectral regularization by taking into account the covariance information (which is not captured by the MMD test) and prove the proposed test to be minimax optimal with a smaller separation boundary than that achieved by the MMD test. Third, we propose an adaptive version of the above test which involves a data-driven strategy to choose the regularization parameter and show the adaptive test to be almost minimax optimal up to a logarithmic factor. Moreover, our results hold for the permutation variant of the test where the test threshold is chosen elegantly through the permutation of the samples. Through numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed test in comparison to the MMD test.

We consider the problem of estimating a multivariate function $f_0$ of bounded variation (BV), from noisy observations $y_i = f_0(x_i) + z_i$ made at random design points $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $i=1,\ldots,n$. We study an estimator that forms the Voronoi diagram of the design points, and then solves an optimization problem that regularizes according to a certain discrete notion of total variation (TV): the sum of weighted absolute differences of parameters $\theta_i,\theta_j$ (which estimate the function values $f_0(x_i),f_0(x_j)$) at all neighboring cells $i,j$ in the Voronoi diagram. This is seen to be equivalent to a variational optimization problem that regularizes according to the usual continuum (measure-theoretic) notion of TV, once we restrict the domain to functions that are piecewise constant over the Voronoi diagram. The regression estimator under consideration hence performs (shrunken) local averaging over adaptively formed unions of Voronoi cells, and we refer to it as the Voronoigram, following the ideas in Koenker (2005), and drawing inspiration from Tukey's regressogram (Tukey, 1961). Our contributions in this paper span both the conceptual and theoretical frontiers: we discuss some of the unique properties of the Voronoigram in comparison to TV-regularized estimators that use other graph-based discretizations; we derive the asymptotic limit of the Voronoi TV functional; and we prove that the Voronoigram is minimax rate optimal (up to log factors) for estimating BV functions that are essentially bounded.

我们考虑估计与I.I.D的排名$ 1 $矩阵因素的问题。高斯，排名$ 1 $的测量值，这些测量值非线性转化和损坏。考虑到非线性的两种典型选择，我们研究了从随机初始化开始的此非convex优化问题的天然交流更新规则的收敛性能。我们通过得出确定性递归，即使在高维问题中也是准确的，我们显示出算法的样本分割版本的敏锐收敛保证。值得注意的是，虽然无限样本的种群更新是非信息性的，并提示单个步骤中的精确恢复，但算法 - 我们的确定性预测 - 从随机初始化中迅速地收敛。我们尖锐的非反应分析也暴露了此问题的其他几种细粒度，包括非线性和噪声水平如何影响收敛行为。从技术层面上讲，我们的结果可以通过证明我们的确定性递归可以通过我们的确定性顺序来预测我们的确定性序列，而当每次迭代都以$ n $观测来运行时，我们的确定性顺序可以通过$ n^{ - 1/2} $的波动。我们的技术利用了源自有关高维$ m $估计文献的遗留工具，并为通过随机数据的其他高维优化问题的随机初始化而彻底地分析了高阶迭代算法的途径。

Consider the problem of matching two independent i.i.d. samples of size $N$ from two distributions $P$ and $Q$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. For an arbitrary continuous cost function, the optimal assignment problem looks for the matching that minimizes the total cost. We consider instead in this paper the problem where each matching is endowed with a Gibbs probability weight proportional to the exponential of the negative total cost of that matching. Viewing each matching as a joint distribution with $N$ atoms, we then take a convex combination with respect to the above Gibbs probability measure. We show that this resulting random joint distribution converges, as $N\rightarrow \infty$, to the solution of a variational problem, introduced by F\"ollmer, called the Schr\"odinger problem. We also derive the first two error terms of orders $N^{-1/2}$ and $N^{-1}$, respectively. This gives us central limit theorems for integrated test functions, including for the cost of transport, and second order Gaussian chaos limits when the limiting Gaussian variance is zero. The proofs are based on a novel chaos decomposition of the discrete Schr\"odinger bridge by polynomial functions of the pair of empirical distributions as the first and second order Taylor approximations in the space of measures. This is achieved by extending the Hoeffding decomposition from the classical theory of U-statistics.