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Statistica Sinica 28 (2018), 27-41

USING DIFFERENTIAL VARIABILITY TO INCREASE
THE POWER OF THE HOMOGENEITY TEST
IN A TWO-SAMPLE PROBLEM
Guanfu Liu1, Yuejiao Fu2, Pengfei Li3 and Xiaolong Pu1
1East China Normal University, 2York University
and 3University of Waterloo

Abstract: We consider a two-sample homogeneity testing problem often encountered in case-control studies with contaminated controls, or in detecting a treatment effect when some subjects are not affected by the treatment in biological experiments. We propose an EM-test designed to simultaneously detect mean difference and differential variability in the two samples. We show that the EM-test statistic has a chi-squared null limiting distribution. The asymptotic properties of the EM-test under local alternatives are also investigated, and sample-size calculation is given. The main results are established for general location-scale family of distributions. Simulation results show that the EM-test outperforms existing methods, and two data examples are used to illustrate the application of the proposed method.

Key words and phrases: Differential variability, EM-test, homogeneity test, limiting distribution, local power, mixture model, two-sample problem.

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