We consider settings in which the data of interest correspond to pairs of ordered times, e.g, the birth times of the first and second child, the times at which a new user creates an account and makes the first purchase on a website, and the entry and survival times of patients in a clinical trial. In these settings, the two times are not independent (the second occurs after the first), yet it is still of interest to determine whether there exists significant dependence {\em beyond} their ordering in time. We refer to this notion as "quasi-(in)dependence". For instance, in a clinical trial, to avoid biased selection, we might wish to verify that recruitment times are quasi-independent of survival times, where dependencies might arise due to seasonal effects. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric statistical test of quasi-independence. Our test considers a potentially infinite space of alternatives, making it suitable for complex data where the nature of the possible quasi-dependence is not known in advance. Standard parametric approaches are recovered as special cases, such as the classical conditional Kendall's tau, and log-rank tests. The tests apply in the right-censored setting: an essential feature in clinical trials, where patients can withdraw from the study. We provide an asymptotic analysis of our test-statistic, and demonstrate in experiments that our test obtains better power than existing approaches, while being more computationally efficient.
We introduce a general non-parametric independence test between right-censored survival times and covariates, which may be multivariate. Our test statistic has a dual interpretation, first in terms of the supremum of a potentially infinite collection of weight-indexed log-rank tests, with weight functions belonging to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) of functions; and second, as the norm of the difference of embeddings of certain finite measures into the RKHS, similar to the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) test-statistic. We study the asymptotic properties of the test, f…
In survival studies, classical inferences for left-truncated data require quasi-independence, a property that the joint density of truncation time and failure time is factorizable into their marginal densities in the observable region. The quasi-independence hypothesis is testable; many authors have developed tests for left-truncated data with or without right-censoring. In this paper, we propose a class of test statistics for testing the quasi-independence which unifies the existing methods and generates new useful statistics such as conditional Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. Asympt…
Constraint-based causal discovery (CCD) algorithms require fast and accurate conditional independence (CI) testing. The Kernel Conditional Independence Test (KCIT) is currently one of the most popular CI tests in the non-parametric setting, but many investigators cannot use KCIT with large datasets because the test scales cubicly with sample size. We therefore devise two relaxations called the Randomized Conditional Independence Test (RCIT) and the Randomized conditional Correlation Test (RCoT) which both approximate KCIT by utilizing random Fourier features. In practice, both of the proposed …
Testing the independence between two random variables $x$ and $y$ is an important problem in statistics and machine learning, where the kernel-based tests of independence is focused to address the study of dependence recently. The advantage of the kernel framework rests on its flexibility in choice of kernel. The Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) was shown to be equivalent to a class of tests, where the tests are based on different distance-induced kernel pairs. In this work, we propose to select the optimal kernel pair by considering local alternatives, and evaluate the efficiency…
Sequential Kernel-based Conditional Independence Testing via Adaptive Betting
Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada（不列颠哥伦比亚大学计算机科学系，温哥华，加拿大）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Edmonton, Canada（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所，爱德蒙顿，加拿大）
The paper presents new metrics to quantify and test for (i) the equality of distributions and (ii) the independence between two high-dimensional random vectors. We show that the energy distance based on the usual Euclidean distance cannot completely characterize the homogeneity of two high-dimensional distributions in the sense that it only detects the equality of means and the traces of covariance matrices in the high-dimensional setup. We propose a new class of metrics which inherits the desirable properties of the energy distance and maximum mean discrepancy/(generalized) distance covarianc…
Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), also called energy distance or N-distance in statistics and Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC), specifically distance covariance in statistics, are among the most popular and successful approaches to quantify the difference and independence of random variables, respectively. Thanks to their kernel-based foundations, MMD and HSIC are applicable on a wide variety of domains. Despite their tremendous success, quite little is known about when HSIC characterizes independence and when MMD with tensor product kernel can discriminate probability distributions…
Two-sample and independence tests with the kernel-based MMD and HSIC have shown remarkable results on i.i.d. data and stationary random processes. However, these statistics are not directly applicable to non-stationary random processes, a prevalent form of data in many scientific disciplines. In this work, we extend the application of MMD and HSIC to non-stationary settings by assuming access to independent realisations of the underlying random process. These realisations - in the form of non-stationary time-series measured on the same temporal grid - can then be viewed as i.i.d. samples from …
This paper introduces the \textit{weighted partial copula} function for testing conditional independence. The proposed test procedure results from these two ingredients: (i) the test statistic is an explicit Cramer-von Mises transformation of the \textit{weighted partial copula}, (ii) the regions of rejection are computed using a bootstrap procedure which mimics conditional independence by generating samples from the product measure of the estimated conditional marginals. Under conditional independence, the weak convergence of the \textit{weighted partial copula proces}s is established when th…
In this work we define log-linear models to compare several square contingency tables under the quasi-independence or the quasi-symmetry model, and the relevant Markov bases are theoretically characterized. Through Markov bases, an exact test to evaluate if two or more tables fit a common model is introduced. Two real-data examples illustrate the use of these models in different fields of applications.
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；London School of Economics and Political Science（伦敦政治经济学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We discuss how MultiFIT, the Multiscale Fisher's Independence Test for Multivariate Dependence proposed by Gorsky and Ma (2022), compares to existing linear-time kernel tests based on the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC). We highlight the fact that the levels of the kernel tests at any finite sample size can be controlled exactly, as it is the case with the level of MultiFIT. In our experiments, we observe some of the performance limitations of MultiFIT in terms of test 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 …
Associating genetic markers with a multidimensional phenotype is an important yet challenging problem. In this work, we establish the equivalence between two popular methods: kernel-machine regression (KMR), and kernel distance covariance (KDC). KMR is a semiparametric regression frameworks that models the covariate effects parametrically, while the genetic markers are considered non-parametrically. KDC represents a class of methods that includes distance covariance (DC) and Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), which are nonparametric tests of independence. We show the equivalence be…
Testing the dependency between two random variables is an important inference problem in statistics since many statistical procedures rely on the assumption that the two samples are independent. To test whether two samples are independent, a so-called HSIC (Hilbert--Schmidt Independence Criterion)-based test has been proposed. Its null distribution is approximated either by permutation or a Gamma approximation. In this paper, a new HSIC-based test is proposed. Its asymptotic null and alternative distributions are established. It is shown that the proposed test is root-n consistent. A three-cum…
High-dimensional variable selection is an important issue in many scientific fields, such as genomics. In this paper, we develop a sure independence feature screening pro- cedure based on kernel canonical correlation analysis (KCCA-SIS, for short). KCCA- SIS is easy to be implemented and applied. Compared to the sure independence screen- ing procedure based on the Pearson correlation (SIS, for short) developed by Fan and Lv [2008], KCCA-SIS can handle nonlinear dependencies among variables. Compared to the sure independence screening procedure based on the distance correlation (DC- SIS, for sh…
In two-way contingency tables we sometimes find that frequencies along the diagonal cells are relatively larger(or smaller) compared to off-diagonal cells, particularly in square tables with the common categories for the rows and the columns. In this case the quasi-independence model with an additional parameter for each of the diagonal cells is usually fitted to the data. A simpler model than the quasi-independence model is to assume a common additional parameter for all the diagonal cells. We consider testing the goodness of fit of the common diagonal effect by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC…
Conditional independence testing is a fundamental problem underlying causal discovery and a particularly challenging task in the presence of nonlinear and high-dimensional dependencies. Here a fully non-parametric test for continuous data based on conditional mutual information combined with a local permutation scheme is presented. Through a nearest neighbor approach, the test efficiently adapts also to non-smooth distributions due to strongly nonlinear dependencies. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the test reliably simulates the null distribution even for small sample sizes and with hi…
We introduce kernel nonparametric tests for Lancaster three-variable interaction and for total independence, using embeddings of signed measures into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. The resulting test statistics are straightforward to compute, and are used in powerful interaction tests, which are consistent against all alternatives for a large family of reproducing kernels. We show the Lancaster test to be sensitive to cases where two independent causes individually have weak influence on a third dependent variable, but their combined effect has a strong influence. This makes the Lancaster…
Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, Bremen, Germany（莱布尼茨预防研究与流行病学研究所 – BIPS，不来梅，德国）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany（不来梅大学数学与计算机科学学院，不来梅，德国）
Many relations of scientific interest are nonlinear, and even in linear systems distributions are often non-Gaussian, for example in fMRI BOLD data. A class of search procedures for causal relations in high dimensional data relies on sample derived conditional independence decisions. The most common applications rely on Gaussian tests that can be systematically erroneous in nonlinear non-Gaussian cases. Recent work (Gretton et al. (2009), Tillman et al. (2009), Zhang et al. (2011)) has proposed conditional independence tests using Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). Among these, perhaps …
Testing for Serial Independence via Auto Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion
Department of Statistics and Data Science, School of Economics, Xiamen University（厦门大学经济学院统计与数据科学系）；Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto（多伦多大学统计科学系）
The relation between wildfire orientation and size is analyzed by means of a nonparametric test for directional-linear independence. The test statistic is designed for assessing the independence between two random variables of different nature, specifically directional (fire orientation, circular or spherical, as particular cases) and linear (fire size measured as burnt area, scalar), based on a directional-linear nonparametric kernel density estimator. In order to apply the proposed methodology in practice, a resampling procedure based on permutations and bootstrap is provided. The finite sam…
We propose a method for feature selection that employs kernel-based measures of independence to find a subset of covariates that is maximally predictive of the response. Building on past work in kernel dimension reduction, we show how to perform feature selection via a constrained optimization problem involving the trace of the conditional covariance operator. We prove various consistency results for this procedure, and also demonstrate that our method compares favorably with other state-of-the-art algorithms on a variety of synthetic and real data sets.
The time-varying kernel density estimation relies on two free parameters: the bandwidth and the discount factor. We propose to select these parameters so as to minimize a criterion consistent with the traditional requirements of the validation of a probability density forecast. These requirements are both the uniformity and the independence of the so-called probability integral transforms, which are the forecast time-varying cumulated distributions applied to the observations. We thus build a new numerical criterion incorporating both the uniformity and independence properties by the mean of a…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数学研究所）
We provide a unifying framework linking two classes of statistics used in two-sample and independence testing: on the one hand, the energy distances and distance covariances from the statistics literature; on the other, maximum mean discrepancies (MMD), that is, distances between embeddings of distributions to reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), as established in machine learning. In the case where the energy distance is computed with a semimetric of negative type, a positive definite kernel, termed distance kernel, may be defined such that the MMD corresponds exactly to the energy dista…
In this article, we propose a class of $L_q$-norm based U-statistics for a family of global testing problems related to high-dimensional data. This includes testing of mean vector and its spatial sign, simultaneous testing of linear model coefficients, and testing of component-wise independence for high-dimensional observations, among others. Under the null hypothesis, we derive asymptotic normality and independence between $L_q$-norm based U-statistics for several $q$s under mild moment and cumulant conditions. A simple combination of two studentized $L_q$-based test statistics via their $p$-…
