On some consistent tests of mutual independence among several random vectors of arbitrary dimensions

Testing for mutual independence among several random vectors is a challenging problem, and in recent years, it has gained significant attention in statistics and machine learning literature. Most of the existing tests of independence deal with only two random vectors, and they do not have straightforward generalizations for testing mutual independence among more than two random vectors of arbitrary dimensions. On the other hand, there are various tests for mutual independence among several random variables, but these univariate tests do not have natural multivariate extensions. In this article, we propose two general recipes, one based on inter-point distances and the other based on linear projections, for multivariate extensions of these univariate tests. Under appropriate regularity conditions, these resulting tests turn out to be consistent whenever we have consistency for the corresponding univariate tests. We carry out extensive numerical studies to compare the empirical performance of these proposed methods with the state-of-the-art methods.