Tag Archives: Lilliefors

Lilliefors, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and cross-validation

In statistics, Kolmogorov–Smirnov test is a popular procedure to test, from a sample \{x_1,\cdots,x_n\} is drawn from a distribution F, or usually F_{\theta_0}, where F_{\theta} is some parametric distribution. For instance, we can test H_0:X_i\sim\mathcal{N(0,1)} (where \theta_0=(\mu_0,\sigma_0^2)=(0,1)) using that test. More specifically, I wanted to discuss today p-values. Given n let us draw \mathcal{N}(0,1) samples of size n, and compute the p-values of Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests

n=300
p = rep(NA,1e5)
for(s in 1:1e5){
X = rnorm(n,0,1)
p[s] = ks.test(X,"pnorm",0,1)$p.value
}

We can visualise the distribution of the p-values below (I added some Beta distribution fit here)

library(fitdistrplus)
fit.dist = fitdist(p,"beta")
hist(p,probability = TRUE,main="",xlab="",ylab="")
vu = seq(0,1,by=.01)
vv = dbeta(vu,shape1 = fit.dist$estimate[1], shape2 = fit.dist$estimate[2])
lines(vu,vv,col="dark red", lwd=2)

It looks like it is quite uniform (theoretically, the p-value is uniform). More specifically, the p-value was lower than 5% in 5% of the samples

[note: here I compute ‘mean(p<=.05)’ but I have some trouble with the ‘<‘ and ‘>’ symbols, as always]

mean(p&lt;=.05)
[1] 0.0479

i.e. we wrongly reject H_0:X_i\sim\mathcal{N(0,1)} is 5% of the samples.

As discussed previously on the blog, in many cases, we do care about the distribution, and not really the parameters, so we wish to test something like H_0:X_i\sim\mathcal{N(\mu,\sigma^2)}, for some \mu and \sigma^2. Therefore, a natural idea can be to test H_0:X_i\sim\mathcal{N(\hat\mu,\hat\sigma^2)}, for some estimates of \mu and \sigma^2. That’s the idea of Lilliefors test. More specifically, Lilliefors test suggests to use , Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics, but corrects the p-value. Indeed, if we draw many samples, and use Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics and its classical p-value to test for H_0:X_i\sim\mathcal{N(\hat\mu,\hat\sigma^2)},

n=300
p = rep(NA,1e5)
for(s in 1:1e5){
X = rnorm(n,0,1)
p[s] = ks.test(X,"pnorm",mean(X),sd(X))$p.value
}

we see clearly that the distribution of p-values is no longer uniform

fit.dist = fitdist(p,"beta")
hist(p,probability = TRUE,main="",xlab="",ylab="")
vu = seq(0,1,by=.01)
vv = dbeta(vu,shape1 = fit.dist$estimate[1], shape2 = fit.dist$estimate[2])
lines(vu,vv,col="dark red", lwd=2)

More specifically, if x_i‘s are actually drawn from some Gaussian distribution, there are no chance to reject H_0, the p-value being almost never below 5%

mean(p&lt;=.05)
[1] 0.00012

Usually, to interpret that result, the heuristics is that \hat\mu and \hat\sigma^2 are both based on the sample, while previously 0 and 1 where based on some prior knowledge. Somehow, it reminded me on the classical problem when mention when we introduce cross-validation, which is Goodhart’s law

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

i.e. we cannot assess goodness of fit using the same data as the ones used to estimate parameters. So here, why not use some hold-out (or cross-validation) procedure : split the dataset in two parts, \{x_1,\cdots,x_k\} (with k<n) to estimate parameters \mu and \sigma^2 and then use \{x_{k+1},\cdots,x_n\} and Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics on it to test if x_i‘s are drawn from some Gaussian distribution. More precisely, will the p-value computed using the standard Kolmogorov–Smirnov procedure be ok here. Here, I tried two scenarios, k/n being either 1/3 or 2/3,

p = matrix(NA,1e5,4)
for(s in 1:1e5){
X = rnorm(n,0,1)
p[s,1] = ks.test(X,"pnorm",0,1)$p.value
p[s,2] = ks.test(X,"pnorm",mean(X),sd(X))$p.value
p[s,3] = ks.test(X[1:200],"pnorm",mean(X[201:300]),sd(X[201:300]))$p.value
p[s,4] = ks.test(X[201:300],"pnorm",mean(X[1:200]),sd(X[1:200]))$p.value
}

Again, we can visualize the distributions of p-values,  in the case where 1/3 of the data is used to estimate \mu and \sigma^2, and 2/3 of the data is used to test

fit.dist = fitdist(p[,3],"beta")
hist(p[,3],probability = TRUE,main="",xlab="",ylab="")
vu=seq(0,1,by=.01)
vv=dbeta(vu,shape1 = fit.dist$estimate[1], shape2 = fit.dist$estimate[2])
lines(vu,vv,col="dark red", lwd=2)


and in the case where 2/3 of the data is used to estimate \mu and \sigma^2, and 1/3 of the data is used to test

fit.dist = fitdist(p[,4],"beta")
hist(p[,4],probability = TRUE,main="",xlab="",ylab="")
vu=seq(0,1,by=.01)
vv=dbeta(vu,shape1 = fit.dist$estimate[1], shape2 = fit.dist$estimate[2])
lines(vu,vv,col="dark red", lwd=2)


Observe here that we (wrongly) reject too frequently H_0, since the p-values are  below 5% in 25% of the scenarios, in the first case (less data used to estimate), and 9% of the scenarios, in the second case (less data used to test)

mean(p[,3]&lt;=.05)
[1] 0.24168
mean(p[,4]&lt;=.05)
[1] 0.09334

We can actually compute that probability as a function of k/n

n=300
p = matrix(NA,1e4,99)
for(s in 1:1e4){
  X = rnorm(n,0,1)
  KS = function(p) ks.test(X[1:(p*n)],"pnorm",mean(X[(p*n+1):n]),sd(X[(p*n+1):n]))$p.value
  p[s,] = Vectorize(KS)((1:99)/100)
}

The evolution of the probability is the following

prob5pc = apply(p,2,function(x) mean(x&lt;=.05))
plot((1:99)/100,prob5pc)

so, it looks like we can use some sort of hold-out procedure to test for H_0:X_i\sim\mathcal{N(\mu,\sigma^2)}, for some \mu and \sigma^2, using Kolmogorov–Smirnov test with \mu=\hat\mu and \sigma^2=\hat\sigma^2 but the proportion of data used to estimate those quantities should be (much) larger that the one used to compute the statistics. Otherwise, we clearly reject too frequently H_0.