Test of independence between tow sets of variates

In this paper asymptotic expansions of the null as well as non-null distributions of the likelihood ratio criterion for testing independence between two sets of variates are obtained. These appear to be better than the ones available in the literature . In factin the null case for p = 1 and p = 2 , t h e expansion reduces to the exact di stribution. In the non-null case, the expansion is given i n terms of non-central beta distributions and for the case when the population canonical correlation coefficients are small.