We introduce the smooth total variation distance as a natural choice to establish equivalence. We propose asymptotic and bootstrap-based tests for which asymptotic optimality is shown. The finite sample performance is studied by simulations. Then we apply tests to real data sets. The tests are...

We introduce new equivalence tests for approximate independence in two-way contingency tables. The critical values are calculated asymptotically. The finite sample performance of the tests is improved by means of the bootstrap. An estimator of boundary points is developed to make the bootstrap...