Multidimensional dependency measures

Abstract

The problem of dependency between two random variables has been studied throughly in the literature. Many dependency measures have been proposed according to concepts such as concordance, quadrant dependency, etc. More recently, the development of the Theory of Copulas has had a great impact in the Study of dependence of random variables specially in the case of continuous random variables. In the case of the multivariate setting, the study of the strong mixing conditions has lead to interesting results that extend some results like the central limit theorem to the case of dependent random variables. In this paper, we study the behavior of a multidimensional extension of two well-known dependency measures, finding their basic properties as well as several examples. The main difference between these measures and others previously proposed is that these ones are based on the definition of independence among n random elements or variables, therefore they provide a nice way to measure dependency. The main purpose of this paper is to present a sample version of one of these measures, find its properties, and based on this sample version to propose a test of independence of multivariate observations. We include several references of applications in Statistics. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.