Test of partial effects for Fréchet regression on Bures-Wasserstein manifolds

Abstract We propose a novel test for assessing partial effects in Fréchet regression on the Bures-Wasserstein manifold. Under the null hypothesis, we show that the statistic admits a degenerate V-statistic approximation whose limiting distribution is aweighted mixture of chi-squared random variables, with weights determined by the eigenvalues of an integral operator associated with a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) kernel. We establish the asymptotic validity and consistency of the proposed test. Its finite-sample performance is examined through simulation studies.We apply the proposed test to study the effect of age, while controlling for other covariates, on gene co-expression structure in single-cell data.