Articles
Jia Min LIU, Gao Rong LI, Jian Qiang ZHANG, Wang Li XU
Test of independence between random vectors $X$ and $Y$ is an essential task in statistical inference. One type of testing methods is based on the minimal spanning tree of variables $X$ and $Y$. The main idea is to generate the minimal spanning tree for one random vector $X$, and for each edges in minimal spanning tree, the corresponding rank number can be calculated based on another random vector $Y$. The resulting test statistics are constructed by these rank numbers. However, the existed statistics are not symmetrical tests about the random vectors $X$ and $Y$ such that the power performance from minimal spanning tree of $X$ is not the same as that from minimal spanning tree of $Y$. In addition, the conclusion from minimal spanning tree of $X$ might conflict with that from minimal spanning tree of $Y$. In order to solve these problems, we propose several symmetrical independence tests for $X$ and $Y$. The exact distributions of test statistics are investigated when the sample size is small. Also, we study the asymptotic properties of the statistics. A permutation method is introduced for getting critical values of the statistics. Compared with the existing methods, our proposed methods are more efficient demonstrated by numerical analysis.