Maybe I can start by showing you a permutation test for the ratio of the geometric means of two samples of size 20 from two different gamma populations (which, of course, have positive support). set.seed(2021) x1 = rgamma(20, 5, .10) x2 = rgamma(20, 5, .2) The respective geometric means are $42.06$ and $24.70.$ Their ratio is `rto.obs`, $1.703.$ Because it seems natural to look at ratios of geometric means, the question is whether $1.703$ is significantly different from $1$ (2-sided test) at the 5% level of significance. g1 = prod(x1)^.05; g2 = prod(x2)^.05 g1; g2 [1] 42.06336 [1] 24.69576 rto.obs = g1/g2; rto.obs [1] 1.703262 Possibly, one could derive the the distribution of the ratio of gamma geometric means to find an exact test. Instead, I will repeatedly scramble the $n_1+n_2 = 40$ observations into two permuted samples each with $n_i = 20$ observations, find the two geometric means, and then their ratio. After doing this $B = 10\,000$ times, I will have $B$ ratios, which can give me a good idea of the distribution of the ratio. Finally, comparing this simulated permutation distribution of ratios with the observed ratio $1.703,$ I can see whether or not the observed ratio is unusually far from $1.$ set.seed(602) x = c(x1, x2) B = 10000; rto.prm = numeric(B) for(i in 1:B) { x.prm = sample(x) rto.prm[i] = prod(x.prm[1:20])^.05/prod(x.prm[21:40])^.05 } mean(rto.prm/rto.obs > .975 | rto.obs/rto.prm < .025) [1] 0.0047 # P-value of sim permutation test. hdr = "Simulated Dist'n of Ratios of Geometric Means" hist(rto.prm, prob=T, col="skyblue2", main=hdr) abline(v=rto.obs);abline(v=1/rto.obs) [![enter image description here][1]][1] [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/ojzBA.png