The Mann–Whitney U-statistic for α-dependent sequences

Abstract

We give the asymptotic behavior of the Mann–Whitney U-statistic for two independent stationary sequences. The result applies to a large class of short-range dependent sequences, including many nonmixing processes in the sense of Rosenblatt [17]. We also give some partial results in the long-range dependent case, and we investigate other related questions. Based on the theoretical results, we propose some simple corrections of the usual tests for stochastic domination; next we simulate different (nonmixing) stationary processes to see that the corrected tests perform well.