Consistency of the Maximal Information Coefficient Estimator

Abstract

The Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) of Reshef et al. (Science, 2011) is a statistic for measuring dependence between variable pairs in large datasets. In this note, we prove that MIC is a consistent estimator of the corresponding population statistic MIC${}_{\ast }$. This corrects an error in an argument of Reshef et al. (JMLR, 2016), which we describe.