14.04.2021 12:15 Mona Azadkia (ETH Zurich):
A Simple Measure Of Conditional Dependence(using Zoom, see http://go.tum.de/410163 for more details) (Parkring 13, 85748 Garching)

We propose a coefficient of conditional dependence between two random variables $Y$ and $Z$, given a set of other variables $X_1, \cdots , X_p$, based on an i.i.d. sample. The coefficient has a long list of desirable properties, the most important of which is that under absolutely no distributional assumptions, it converges to a limit in $[0, 1]$, where the limit is 0 if and only if $Y$ and $Z$ are conditionally independent given $X_1, \cdots , X_p$, and is 1 if and only if Y is equal to a measurable function of $Z$ given $X_1, \cdots , X_p$. Moreover, it has a natural interpretation as a nonlinear generalization of the familiar partial $R^2$ statistic for measuring conditional dependence by regression. Using this statistic, we devise a new variable selection algorithm, called Feature Ordering by Conditional Independence (FOCI), which is model-free, has no tuning parameters, and is provably consistent under sparsity assumptions. A number of applications to synthetic and real datasets are worked out.