Higher-order U-statistics abound in fields such as statistics, machine learning, and computer science, but are known to be highly time-consuming to compute in practice. Despite their widespread appearance, a comprehensive study of their computational complexity is surprisingly lacking. This paper aims to fill that gap by presenting several results related to the computational aspect of U-statistics. First, we derive a useful decomposition from an m-th order U-statistic to a linear combination of V-statistics with orders not exceeding m, which are generally more feasible to compute. Second, we explore the connection between exactly computing V-statistics and Einstein summation, a tool often used in computational mathematics, quantum computing, and quantum information sciences for accelerating tensor computations. Third, we provide an optimistic estimate of the time complexity for exactly computing U-statistics, based on the treewidth of a particular graph associated with the U-statistic kernel. The above ingredients lead to a new, much more runtime-efficient algorithm of exactly computing general higher-order U-statistics. We also wrap our new algorithm into an open-source Python package called u-stats. We demonstrate via three statistical applications that u-stats achieves impressive runtime performance compared to existing benchmarks. This paper aspires to achieve two goals: (1) to capture the interest of researchers in both statistics and other related areas further to advance the algorithmic development of U-statistics, and (2) to offer the package u-stats as a valuable tool for practitioners, making the implementation of methods based on higher-order U-statistics a more delightful experience.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.