Kernel-based tests for joint independence

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Pfister, Niklas; Buhlmann, Peter; Schoelkopf, Bernhard; Peters, Jonas
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; University of Copenhagen
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY SERIES B-STATISTICAL METHODOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1369-7412
• DOI: 10.1111/rssb.12235
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 5-31
• 关键词: consistent test; distance; bootstrap

摘要

We investigate the problem of testing whether d possibly multivariate random variables, which may or may not be continuous, are jointly (or mutually) independent. Our method builds on ideas of the two-variable Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion but allows for an arbitrary number of variables. We embed the joint distribution and the product of the marginals in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space and define the d-variable Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion dHSIC as the squared distance between the embeddings. In the population case, the value of dHSIC is 0 if and only if the d variables are jointly independent, as long as the kernel is characteristic. On the basis of an empirical estimate of dHSIC, we investigate three non-parametric hypothesis tests: a permutation test, a bootstrap analogue and a procedure based on a gamma approximation. We apply non-parametric independence testing to a problem in causal discovery and illustrate the new methods on simulated and real data sets.