Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Felix Biggs, Antonin Schrab, Arthur Gretton
We propose novel statistics which maximise the power of a two-sample test based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), byadapting over the set of kernels used in defining it.For finite sets, this reduces to combining (normalised) MMD values under each of these kernels via a weighted soft maximum.Exponential concentration bounds are proved for our proposed statistics under the null and alternative.We further show how these kernels can be chosen in a data-dependent but permutation-independent way, in a well-calibrated test, avoiding data splitting.This technique applies more broadly to general permutation-based MMD testing, and includes the use of deep kernels with features learnt using unsupervised models such as auto-encoders.We highlight the applicability of our MMD-Fuse tests on both synthetic low-dimensional and real-world high-dimensional data, and compare its performance in terms of power against current state-of-the-art kernel tests.