Matching is a powerful statistical tool in design and analysis. Conventional two-group, or bipartite, matching has been widely used in practice. However, its utility is limited to simpler designs. In contrast, nonbipartite matching is not limited to the two-group case, handling multiparty matching situations. It can be used to find the set of matches that minimize the sum of distances based on a given distance matrix. It brings greater flexibility to the matching design, such as multigroup comparisons. Thanks to improvements in computing power and freely available algorithms to solve nonbipartite problems, the cost in terms of computation time and complexity is low. This article reviews the optimal nonbipartite matching algorithm and its statistical applications, including observational studies with complex designs and an exact distribution-free test comparing two multivariate distributions. We also introduce an R package that performs optimal nonbipartite matching. We present an easily accessible web application to make nonbipartite matching freely available to general researchers.

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Abstract-Coordinated multi-point transmission/reception aided collocated antenna system (CoMP-CAS) and mobile relay assisted fractional frequency reuse distributed antenna system (MR-FFR-DAS) constitute a pair of virtual-MIMO based technical options for achieving high spectral efficiency in interference-limited cellular networks. In practice both techniques have their respective pros and cons, which are studied in this paper by evaluating the achievable cell-edge performance on the uplink of multicell systems. We show that assuming the same antenna configuration in both networks, the maximum available cooperative spatial diversity inherent in the MR-FFR-DAS is lower than that of the CoMP-CAS. However, when the cell-edge MSs have a low transmission power, the lower-complexity MR-FFR-DAS relying on the simple single-cell processing may outperform the CoMP-CAS by using the proposed soft-combining based probabilistic data association (SC-PDA) receiver, despite the fact that the latter scheme is more complex and incurs a higher cooperation overhead. Furthermore, the benefits of the SC-PDA receiver may be enhanced by properly selecting the MRs' positions. Additionally, we show that the performance of the cell-edge MSs roaming near the angular direction halfway between two adjacent RAs (i.e. the "worst-case direction") of the MR-FFR-DAS may be more significantly improved than that of the cell-edge MSs of other directions by using multiuser power control, which also improves the fairness amongst cell-edge MSs. Our simulation results show that given a moderate MS transmit power, the proposed MR-FFR-DAS architecture employing the SC-PDA receiver is capable of achieving significantly better bit-error rate (BER) and effective throughput across the entire cell-edge area, including even the worst-case direction and the cell-edge boundary, than the CoMP-CAS architecture.Index Terms-Base station cooperation, coordinated multipoint (CoMP), fractional frequency reuse, distributed antenna system (DAS), multicell uplink, mobile relay.