ICML 2022spotlight11 citations

An Asymptotic Test for Conditional Independence using Analytic Kernel Embeddings

Meyer Scetbon, Laurent Meunier, Yaniv Romano

Abstract

We propose a new conditional dependence measure and a statistical test for conditional independence. The measure is based on the difference between analytic kernel embeddings of two well-suited distributions evaluated at a finite set of locations. We obtain its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of conditional independence and design a consistent statistical test from it. We conduct a series of experiments showing that our new test outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in terms of type-I and type-II errors even in the high dimensional setting.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v162-scetbon22a,
  title = 	 {An Asymptotic Test for Conditional Independence using Analytic Kernel Embeddings},
  author =       {Scetbon, Meyer and Meunier, Laurent and Romano, Yaniv},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {19328--19346},
  year = 	 {2022},
  editor = 	 {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Jegelka, Stefanie and Song, Le and Szepesvari, Csaba and Niu, Gang and Sabato, Sivan},
  volume = 	 {162},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {17--23 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/scetbon22a/scetbon22a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/scetbon22a.html},
  abstract = 	 {We propose a new conditional dependence measure and a statistical test for conditional independence. The measure is based on the difference between analytic kernel embeddings of two well-suited distributions evaluated at a finite set of locations. We obtain its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of conditional independence and design a consistent statistical test from it. We conduct a series of experiments showing that our new test outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in terms of type-I and type-II errors even in the high dimensional setting.}
}
An Asymptotic Test for Conditional Independence using Analytic Kernel Embeddings · ICML 2022