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.

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.

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.

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。

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.

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.

我们提出了一种基于最大平均差异（MMD）的新型非参数两样本测试，该测试是通过具有不同核带宽的聚合测试来构建的。这种称为MMDAGG的聚合过程可确保对所使用的内核的收集最大化测试能力，而无需持有核心选择的数据（这会导致测试能力损失）或任意内核选择，例如中位数启发式。我们在非反应框架中工作，并证明我们的聚集测试对Sobolev球具有最小自适应性。我们的保证不仅限于特定的内核，而是符合绝对可集成的一维翻译不变特性内核的任何产品。此外，我们的结果适用于流行的数值程序来确定测试阈值，即排列和野生引导程序。通过对合成数据集和现实世界数据集的数值实验，我们证明了MMDAGG优于MMD内核适应的替代方法，用于两样本测试。

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。

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。

We develop an online kernel Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) procedure, which consists of a parallel set of kernel statistics with different window sizes to account for the unknown change-point location. Compared with many existing sliding window-based kernel change-point detection procedures, which correspond to the Shewhart chart-type procedure, the proposed procedure is more sensitive to small changes. We further present a recursive computation of detection statistics, which is crucial for online procedures to achieve a constant computational and memory complexity, such that we do not need to calculate and remember the entire Gram matrix, which can be a computational bottleneck otherwise. We obtain precise analytic approximations of the two fundamental performance metrics, the Average Run Length (ARL) and Expected Detection Delay (EDD). Furthermore, we establish the optimal window size on the order of $\log ({\rm ARL})$ such that there is nearly no power loss compared with an oracle procedure, which is analogous to the classic result for window-limited Generalized Likelihood Ratio (GLR) procedure. We present extensive numerical experiments to validate our theoretical results and the competitive performance of the proposed method.

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）} $。

我们提出了对学度校正随机块模型（DCSBM）的合适性测试。该测试基于调整后的卡方统计量，用于测量$ n $多项式分布的组之间的平等性，该分布具有$ d_1，\ dots，d_n $观测值。在网络模型的背景下，多项式的数量（$ n $）的数量比观测值数量（$ d_i $）快得多，与节点$ i $的度相对应，因此设置偏离了经典的渐近学。我们表明，只要$ \ {d_i \} $的谐波平均值生长到无穷大，就可以使统计量在NULL下分配。顺序应用时，该测试也可以用于确定社区数量。该测试在邻接矩阵的压缩版本上进行操作，因此在学位上有条件，因此对大型稀疏网络具有高度可扩展性。我们结合了一个新颖的想法，即在测试$ K $社区时根据$（k+1）$ - 社区分配来压缩行。这种方法在不牺牲计算效率的情况下增加了顺序应用中的力量，我们证明了它在恢复社区数量方面的一致性。由于测试统计量不依赖于特定的替代方案，因此其效用超出了顺序测试，可用于同时测试DCSBM家族以外的各种替代方案。特别是，我们证明该测试与具有社区结构的潜在可变性网络模型的一般家庭一致。

我们研究了基于内核Stein差异（KSD）的合适性测试的特性。我们介绍了一种构建一个名为KSDAGG的测试的策略，该测试与不同的核聚集了多个测试。 KSDAGG避免将数据分开以执行内核选择（这会导致测试能力损失），并最大程度地提高了核集合的测试功率。我们提供有关KSDAGG的力量的理论保证：我们证明它达到了收集最小的分离率，直到对数期限。可以在实践中准确计算KSDAGG，因为它依赖于参数bootstrap或野生引导程序来估计分位数和级别校正。特别是，对于固定核的带宽至关重要的选择，它避免了诉诸于任意启发式方法（例如中位数或标准偏差）或数据拆分。我们在合成数据和现实世界中发现KSDAGG优于其他基于自适应KSD的拟合优度测试程序。

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。

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.

我们提出了一种统一的技术，用于顺序估计分布之间的凸面分歧，包括内核最大差异等积分概率度量，$ \ varphi $ - 像Kullback-Leibler发散，以及最佳运输成本，例如Wassersein距离的权力。这是通过观察到经验凸起分歧（部分有序）反向半角分离的实现来实现的，而可交换过滤耦合，其具有这些方法的最大不等式。这些技术似乎是对置信度序列和凸分流的现有文献的互补和强大的补充。我们构建一个离线到顺序设备，将各种现有的离线浓度不等式转换为可以连续监测的时间均匀置信序列，在任意停止时间提供有效的测试或置信区间。得到的顺序边界仅在相应的固定时间范围内支付迭代对数价格，保留对问题参数的相同依赖性（如适用的尺寸或字母大小）。这些结果也适用于更一般的凸起功能，如负差分熵，实证过程的高度和V型统计。

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。

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。