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On Robust hypothesis testing with respect to Hellinger distance

Published: October 19, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.16750v1

By: Eeshan Modak

Potential Business Impact:

Makes computer tests work even with wrong guesses.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

We study the hypothesis testing problem where the observed samples need not come from either of the specified hypotheses (distributions). In such a situation, we would like our test to be robust to this misspecification and output the distribution closer in Hellinger distance. If the underlying distribution is close to being equidistant from the hypotheses, then this would not be possible. Our main result is quantifying how close the underlying distribution has to be to either of the hypotheses. We also study the composite testing problem, where each hypothesis is a Hellinger ball around a fixed distribution. A generalized likelihood ratio test is known to work for this problem. We give an alternate test for the same.

Page Count
14 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Statistics Theory