On Robust hypothesis testing with respect to Hellinger distance

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16750v1
• Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:20:43 GMT
• Title: On Robust hypothesis testing with respect to Hellinger distance
• Authors: Eeshan Modak,
• Abstract summary: We study the hypothesis testing problem where the observed samples need not come from either of the specified hypotheses.<n>In such a situation, we would like our test to be robust to this misspecification and output the distribution closer in Hellinger distance.<n>Our main result is quantifying how close the underlying distribution has to be to either of the hypotheses.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We study the hypothesis testing problem where the observed samples need not come from either of the specified hypotheses (distributions). In such a situation, we would like our test to be robust to this misspecification and output the distribution closer in Hellinger distance. If the underlying distribution is close to being equidistant from the hypotheses, then this would not be possible. Our main result is quantifying how close the underlying distribution has to be to either of the hypotheses. We also study the composite testing problem, where each hypothesis is a Hellinger ball around a fixed distribution. A generalized likelihood ratio test is known to work for this problem. We give an alternate test for the same.

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