Measuring and testing for interval quantile dependence

Abstract

In this article, we introduce the notion of interval quantile independence which generalizes the notions of statistical independence and quantile independence. We suggest an index to measure and test departure from interval quantile independence. The proposed index is invariant to monotone transformations, nonnegative and equals zero if and only if the interval quantile independence holds true. We suggest a moment estimate to implement the test. The resultant estimator is root-$n$-consistent if the index is positive and $n$-consistent otherwise, leading to a consistent test of interval quantile independence. The asymptotic distribution of the moment estimator is free of parent distribution, which facilitates to decide the critical values for tests of interval quantile independence. When our proposed index is used to perform feature screening for ultrahigh dimensional data, it has the desirable sure screening property.