Density of a random interval catch digraph family and its use for testing uniformity

Abstract

We consider (arc) density of a parameterized interval catch digraph (ICD) family with random vertices residing on the real line. The ICDs are random digraphs where randomness lies in the vertices and are defined with two parameters, a centrality parameter and an expansion parameter, hence they will be referred as central similarity ICDs (CS-ICDs). We show that arc density of CS-ICDs is a U-statistic for vertices being from a wide family of distributions with support on the real line, and provide the asymptotic (normal) distribution for the (interiors of) entire ranges of centrality and expansion parameters for one dimensional uniform data. We also determine the optimal parameter values at which the rate of convergence (to normality) is fastest. We use arc density of CS-ICDs for testing uniformity of one dimensional data, and compare its performance with arc density of another ICD family and two other tests in literature (namely, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Neyman’s smooth test of uniformity) in terms of empirical size and power. We show that tests based on ICDs have better power performance for certain alternatives (that are symmetric around the middle of the support of the data).