Back

DTH: A nonparametric test for homogeneity of multivariate dispersions

Roy, A.; Satten, G.; Zhao, N.

2025-07-04 genomics
10.1101/2025.06.29.662200 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Testing homogeneity across groups in multivariate data is an important scientific question in its own right, as well as well as an auxiliary step in verifying the assumptions of ANOVA. Existing methods either construct test statistics based on the distance of each observation from the group center, or as the mean of pairwise dissimilarities among observations in a group. Both approaches can fail when mean within-group distance is similar across groups but the distribution of the within-group distances are different. This is a pertinent question in high dimensional microbiome data, where outliers and overdispersion can distort the performance of a mean-dissimilarity-based test. We introduce the non-parametric Distance based Test for Homogeneity (DTH) which measures dissimilarity between groups by comparing the empirical distribution of within-group dissimilarities using a combination of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Wasserstein distances. For more than two groups, pairwise group tests are combined using a permutation-based p-value. Through simulations we show that our method has higher power than existing tests for homogeneity in certain situations and comparable power in other situations. We also provide a simple framework for extending the test to a continuous covariate.

Published in Bioinformatics (predicted rank #1) · training set

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.