New Tests of Randomness and Independence for Sequences of Observations

There is no statistical test that assesses whether a sequence of observations, time series, or residuals in a regression model, exhibits independence or not. Typically, what data scientists do is to look at auto-correlations and see whether they are close enough to zero. If the data follows a Gaussian distribution, then absence of auto-correlations implies independence. Here however, we are dealing with non-Gaussian observations. The setting is similar to testing whether a pseudo-random number generator is random enough, or whether the digits of a number such as π behave in a way that looks random, even though the sequence of digits is deterministic.