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A Practical Introduction to Kernel Discrepancies: MMD, HSIC & KSD

Published: March 4, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2503.04820v2

By: Antonin Schrab

Potential Business Impact:

Measures how different two groups of data are.

Business Areas:
Intrusion Detection Information Technology, Privacy and Security

This article provides a practical introduction to kernel discrepancies, focusing on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), and the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD). Various estimators for these discrepancies are presented, including the commonly-used V-statistics and U-statistics, as well as several forms of the more computationally-efficient incomplete U-statistics. The importance of the choice of kernel bandwidth is stressed, showing how it affects the behaviour of the discrepancy estimation. Adaptive estimators are introduced, which combine multiple estimators with various kernels, addressing the problem of kernel selection.

Page Count
26 pages

Category
Statistics:
Machine Learning (Stat)