BEAUTY Powered BEAST
This work addresses the need for robust and interpretable statistical tests for dependency in data, representing an incremental advancement in the field.
The paper tackles the problem of distribution-free goodness-of-fit tests by proposing the BEAUTY approach, which unifies many independence tests and leads to the BEAST method that improves empirical power against common alternatives.
We study distribution-free goodness-of-fit tests with the proposed Binary Expansion Approximation of UniformiTY (BEAUTY) approach. This method generalizes the renowned Euler's formula, and approximates the characteristic function of any copula through a linear combination of expectations of binary interactions from marginal binary expansions. This novel theory enables a unification of many important tests of independence via approximations from specific quadratic forms of symmetry statistics, where the deterministic weight matrix characterizes the power properties of each test. To achieve a robust power, we examine test statistics with data-adaptive weights, referred to as the Binary Expansion Adaptive Symmetry Test (BEAST). For any given alternative, we demonstrate that the Neyman-Pearson test can be approximated by an oracle weighted sum of symmetry statistics. The BEAST with this oracle provides a useful benchmark of feasible power. To approach this oracle power, we devise the BEAST through a regularized resampling approximation of the oracle test. The BEAST improves the empirical power of many existing tests against a wide spectrum of common alternatives and delivers a clear interpretation of dependency forms when significant.