Convolutional Maximum Mean Discrepancy for Inference in Noisy Data

Published in arXiv preprint, 2026

Abstract

This work introduces a novel framework for inference with samples corrupted by potentially heteroscedastic noise from a known distribution. Central to our approach is the convolutional MMD (convMMD), which compares distributions after noise convolution and retains metric validity under standard kernel conditions. We establish finite-sample deviation bounds that are unaffected by measurement error and prove an equivalence between testing under noise and kernel smoothing.