Testing Conditional Distribution Equality Using Generative Models
Read the original on arXiv Statistics ML →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Statistics ML.
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arXiv:2501. 18897v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative models have achieved remarkable success across a range of applications, yet their evaluation still lacks principled uncertainty quantification.
arXiv:2512. 19510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conditional independence (CI) is central to causal inference, feature selection, and graphical modeling, yet it is untestable in many settings without additional assumptions.
The paper introduces a new estimand for conditional distributional treatment effects that captures how treatments influence the entire outcome distribution, including variance and tail risks, in a covariate-dependent manner. It presents a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal locally and uses it to construct a test for global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions. The test accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy, guarantees valid type‑1 error, is consistent against fixed alternatives, and includes a computationally efficient, permutation‑free algorithm with exact closed‑form expressions for two natural discrepancies.
arXiv:2609.23789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern conditional generative models face significant challenges when learning complex covariate dependencies. While sufficient dimension reduction (SD...
The paper introduces a Conditional Kernel Stein Discrepancy (CKSD) that extends traditional Kernel Stein Discrepancies to evaluate goodness‑of‑fit for conditional distributions. By employing an operator‑valued kernel on the covariate space, the authors lift unconditional KSDs to settings where only a conditional target model and joint samples are available, covering both smooth manifolds and discrete spaces. They prove that the CKSD statistic vanishes exactly when the conditional model matches the true conditional distribution for almost all covariates, and demonstrate its practical effectiveness through experiments on level, power, and runtime.
arXiv:2604. 23904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference.