Section: New Results

Are your data data gathered? The Folding Test of Unimodality

Participants: A. Siffer, C. Largouët, A. Termier

Understanding data distributions is one of the most fundamental research topics in data analysis. The literature provides a great deal of powerful statistical learning algorithms to gain knowledge on the underlying distribution given multivariate observations. We are likely to find out a dependence between features, the appearance of clusters or the presence of outliers. Before such deep investigations, [13] proposes the folding test of unimodality. As a simple statistical description, it allows to detect whether data are gathered or not (unimodal or multimodal). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multivariate and purely statistical unimodality test. It makes no distribution assumption and relies only on a straightforward p-value. Experiments on real world data show the relevance of the test and how to use it for the task of clustering.