Motivated by applications in text mining and discrete distribution inference, we test for equality of probability mass functions of K groups of high-dimensional multinomial distributions. Special cases of this problem include global testing for topic models, two-sample testing in authorship attribution, and closeness testing for discrete distributions. A test statistic, which is shown to have an asymptotic standard normal distribution under the null hypothesis, is proposed. This parameter-free limiting null distribution holds true without requiring identical multinomial parameters within each group or equal group sizes. The optimal detection boundary for this testing problem is established, and the proposed test is shown to achieve this optimal detection boundary across the entire parameter space of interest. The proposed method is demonstrated in simulation studies and applied to analyse two real-world datasets to examine, respectively, variation among customer reviews of Amazon movies and the diversity of statistical paper abstracts.
Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher.
Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.
-
Abstract Free, publicly-accessible full text available February 28, 2025