Abstract
A simple nonparametric test of complete or total independence is suggested for continuous multivariate distributions. This procedure first discretizes the original variables based on their order statistics, and then tests the hypothesis of complete independence for the resulting contingency table. Under the hypothesis of independence, the chi-squared test statistic has an asymptotic chi-squared distribution. We present a simulation study to illustrate the accuracy in finite samples of the limiting distribution of the test statistic. We compare our method to another nonparametric test of complete independence via a simulation study. Finally, we apply our method to the residuals from a real data set.
