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A Martingale Kernel Two-Sample Test

Published: October 13, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.11853v1

By: Anirban Chatterjee, Aaditya Ramdas

Potential Business Impact:

Finds differences between groups faster.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is a widely used multivariate distance metric for two-sample testing. The standard MMD test statistic has an intractable null distribution typically requiring costly resampling or permutation approaches for calibration. In this work we leverage a martingale interpretation of the estimated squared MMD to propose martingale MMD (mMMD), a quadratic-time statistic which has a limiting standard Gaussian distribution under the null. Moreover we show that the test is consistent against any fixed alternative and for large sample sizes, mMMD offers substantial computational savings over the standard MMD test, with only a minor loss in power.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
40 pages

Category
Statistics:
Methodology