Generative and Nonparametric Approaches for Conditional Distribution Estimation: Methods, Perspectives, and Comparative Evaluations

TL;DR

This paper reviews and compares classical nonparametric and modern generative methods for estimating conditional distributions, providing a systematic evaluation of their accuracy, flexibility, and computational costs.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive comparison of diverse approaches for conditional distribution estimation, including recent deep generative models, with a unified evaluation framework.

Findings

Generative models outperform classical methods in flexibility.

Nonparametric methods are computationally less intensive.

Deep generative approaches achieve lower Wasserstein distances.

Abstract

The inference of conditional distributions is a fundamental problem in statistics, essential for prediction, uncertainty quantification, and probabilistic modeling. A wide range of methodologies have been developed for this task. This article reviews and compares several representative approaches spanning classical nonparametric methods and modern generative models. We begin with the single-index method of Hall and Yao (2005), which estimates the conditional distribution through a dimension-reducing index and nonparametric smoothing of the resulting one-dimensional cumulative conditional distribution function. We then examine the basis-expansion approaches, including FlexCode (Izbicki and Lee, 2017) and DeepCDE (Dalmasso et al., 2020), which convert conditional density estimation into a set of nonparametric regression problems. In addition, we discuss two recent generative simulation-based methods that leverage modern deep generative architectures: the generative conditional distribution sampler (Zhou et al., 2023) and the conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (Fu et al., 2024; Yang et al., 2025). A systematic numerical comparison of these approaches is provided using a unified evaluation framework that ensures fairness and reproducibility. The performance metrics used for the estimated conditional distribution include the mean-squared errors of conditional mean and standard deviation, as well as the Wasserstein distance. We also discuss their flexibility and computational costs, highlighting the distinct advantages and limitations of each approach.