Conditional independence test by generalized Kendall’s tau with generalized odds ratio

Abstract

Determining conditional dependence is a challenging but important task in both model building and in applications such as genetic association studies and graphical models. Research on this topic has focused on kernel-based methods or has used categorical conditioning variables because of the challenge of the curse of dimensionality. To overcome this challenge, we propose a class of tests for conditional independence without any restriction on the distribution of the conditioning variables. The proposed test statistic can be treated as a generalized weighted Kendall’s tau, in which the generalized odds ratio is utilized as a weight function to account for the distance between different values of the conditioning variables. The test procedure has desirable asymptotic properties and is easy to implement. We evaluate the finite sample performance of the proposed test through simulation studies and illustrate it using two real data examples.