Power Studies For Two-sample Methods For Multivariate Data

We present the results of a large number of simulation studies regarding the power of various non-parametric two-sample tests for multivariate data. This includes both continuous and discrete data. In general no single method can be relied upon to provide good power, any one method may be quite good for some combination of null hypothesis and alternative and may fail badly for another. Based on the results of these studies we propose a fairly small number of methods chosen such that for any of the case studies included here at least one of the methods has good power. The studies were carried out using the R package MD2sample, available from CRAN.