On May 30, 2015, at 7:09 AM, Wensui Liu wrote:

> Thanks for your insight, David
> But I am not interested in comparing means among multiple groups.
> Instead, I want to compare empirical distributions. In this case, I am
> not sure if wilcoxon should be still applicable.
> 
> still appreciate it.

The Wilcoxon Rank Sum is not comparing means (or medians as I mistakenly 
thought in the past) but is a more general test of location. You are correct in 
thinking that the KS test is implicitly testing a wider range of hypotheses, 
although it remains fairly weak against specific tests. I wasn't suggesting the 
coin package simply because of its capacity to generalize the WRS test but 
because of its capacity to support permutation tests of many sorts. 

If you are testing at all, then there would seem to be a likelihood (in the 
vague sense of consideration of possible goals of your testing proces) that you 
really would be interested in departures from "equality of distribution" that 
might have a more specific description, and might therefore be interested in 
testing strategies with more power, perhaps a compound test for differences in 
location and spread.

-- 
David.

 
> 
> On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:32 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net> 
> wrote:
>> 
>> On May 29, 2015, at 9:31 AM, Wensui Liu wrote:
>> 
>>> Good morning, All
>>> I have a stat question not specifically related to the the programming 
>>> language.
>>> To compare distributional consistency / discrepancy between two
>>> samples, we usually use kolmogorov-smirnov test, which is implemented
>>> in R with ks.test() or in SAS with "pro npar1way edf".
>>> I am wondering if there is any alternative to KS test that could be
>>> generalized to K-samples.
>> 
>> The 'coin' package (Hothorn, Hornick, van de Weil, and Zeileis) presents a 
>> variety of permutation and rank-based tests that would probably be more 
>> powerful than any multi-group variant of the KS test. The multi-group 
>> variant of the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test presented in the examples for the help 
>> page: ?wilcox_test is the Nemenyi-Damico-Wolfe-Dunn test.
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> David Winsemius
>> Alameda, CA, USA
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ==============================
> WenSui Liu
> Credit Risk Manager, 53 Bancorp
> wensui....@53.com
> 513-295-4370
> ==============================

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA

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