We describe a novel non-parametric statistical hypothesis test of relative
dependence between a source variable and two candidate target variables. Such a
test enables us to determine whether one source variable is significantly more
dependent on a first target variable or a second. Dependence is measured via
the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), resulting in a pair of
empirical dependence measures (source-target 1, source-target 2). We test
whether the first dependence measure is significantly larger than the second.
Modeling the covariance between these HSIC statistics leads to a provably more
powerful test than the construction of independent HSIC statistics by
sub-sampling. The resulting test is consistent and unbiased, and (being based
on U-statistics) has favorable convergence properties. The test can be computed
in quadratic time, matching the computational complexity of standard empirical
HSIC estimators. The effectiveness of the test is demonstrated on several
real-world problems: we identify language groups from a multilingual corpus,
and we prove that tumor location is more dependent on gene expression than
chromosomal imbalances. Source code is available for download at
this https URL

使用 Hilbert-Schmidt 独立准则（HSIC）测量依赖性，建立了新型非参数统计假设检验方法，用于确定一个源变量对于两个候选目标变量的依赖性。测试表明第一个依赖度量是否显著大于第二个，其结果表明建立这些 HSIC 统计数据之间的协方差计算比独立 HSIC 统计量的子采样法更有效。