Practical Kernel Tests of Conditional Independence
<|reference_start|>Practical Kernel Tests of Conditional Independence: We describe a data-efficient, kernel-based approach to statistical testing of conditional independence. A major challenge of conditional independence testing, absent in tests of unconditional independence, is to obtain the correct test level (the specified upper bound on the rate of false positives), while still attaining competitive test power. Excess false positives arise due to bias in the test statistic, which is obtained using nonparametric kernel ridge regression. We propose three methods for bias control to correct the test level, based on data splitting, auxiliary data, and (where possible) simpler function classes. We show these combined strategies are effective both for synthetic and real-world data.<|reference_end|>
@article{pogodin2024practical,
    title={Practical Kernel Tests of Conditional Independence},
    author={Roman Pogodin, Antonin Schrab, Yazhe Li, Danica J. Sutherland, Arthur
  Gretton},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.13196},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.13196},
    primaryClass={cs.LG}
}