one of the tests in std is there to handle an empty array with dimension larger than two. the last comment on that bug tracker gives a few examples of odd Matlab output from different forms of multidimensional empties, and that the old test no longer matches Matlab output.
looking for comment on how much of that I should try to cover in the patches for those statistics functions? handling procedure is almost identical for the different functions, so once code to catch the cases is written I can copy/paste to the others easily enough.