Biometrika Sep 08, 2026

Bias correction for Chatterjee’s graph-based correlation coefficient

Authors
Fang Han Mona Azadkia Leihao Chen
Paper Information
  • Journal:
    Biometrika
  • DOI:
    10.1093/biomet/asag051
  • Published:
    September 08, 2026
  • Added to Tracker:
    Sep 10, 2026
Abstract

Summary Azadkia & Chatterjee (2021) recently introduced a simple nearest-neighbour graph-based correlation coefficient that consistently detects both independence and functional dependence, in both unconditional and conditional settings. Specifically, it approximates a measure of dependence that equals 0 if and only if the variables are (conditionally) independent, and 1 if and only if they are (conditionally) functionally dependent. However, this nearest-neighbour estimator includes a bias term that may vanish at a rate slower than n1/2, preventing consistency at rate n1/2 in general. In this article, focusing on the unconditional version, we (i) analyse this bias term closely and show that it could become asymptotically negligible when the dimension is at most three and (ii) propose a bias-correction procedure for more general settings. In both regimes, we obtain estimators (either the original or the bias-corrected version) that are consistent at the parametric rate n1/2 and asymptotically normal.

Author Details
Fang Han
Author
Mona Azadkia
Author
Leihao Chen
Author
Citation Information
APA Format
Fang Han , Mona Azadkia & Leihao Chen (2026) . Bias correction for Chatterjee’s graph-based correlation coefficient. Biometrika , 10.1093/biomet/asag051.
BibTeX Format
@article{paper1667,
  title = { Bias correction for Chatterjee’s graph-based correlation coefficient },
  author = { Fang Han and Mona Azadkia and Leihao Chen },
  journal = { Biometrika },
  year = { 2026 },
  doi = { 10.1093/biomet/asag051 },
  url = { https://doi.org/10.1093/biomet/asag051 }
}