Alex Cloninger
UCSD
Abstract:
This talk introduces a new kernel-based Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD)
statistic for measuring the distance between two distributions given
finitely-many multivariate samples. When the distributions are locally
low-dimensional, the proposed test can be made more powerful to
distinguish certain alternatives by incorporating local covariance
matrices and constructing an anisotropic kernel. The kernel matrix is
asymmetric; it computes the affinity between n data points and a set of
n_R reference points, where n_R can be drastically smaller than n.\302
While the proposed statistic can be viewed as a special class of
Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space MMD, the consistency of the test is
proved, under mild assumptions of the kernel, as long as ||p-q|| ~
O(n^{-1/2+\delta}) for any \delta>0 based on a result of convergence in
distribution of the test statistic. Applications to flow cytometry and
diffusion MRI data sets are demonstrated, which motivate the proposed
approach to compare distributions.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
11:00AM AP&M 2402