English

Bounding quantiles of Wasserstein distance between true and empirical measure

Probability 2019-07-04 v1 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

Consider the empirical measure, P^N\hat{\mathbb{P}}_N, associated to NN i.i.d. samples of a given probability distribution P\mathbb{P} on the unit interval. For fixed P\mathbb{P} the Wasserstein distance between P^N\hat{\mathbb{P}}_N and P\mathbb{P} is a random variable on the sample space [0,1]N[0,1]^N. Our main result is that its normalised quantiles are asymptotically maximised when P\mathbb{P} is a convex combination between the uniform distribution supported on the two points {0,1}\{0,1\} and the uniform distribution on the unit interval [0,1][0,1]. This allows us to obtain explicit asymptotic confidence regions for the underlying measure P\mathbb{P}. We also suggest extensions to higher dimensions with numerical evidence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.02006,
  title  = {Bounding quantiles of Wasserstein distance between true and empirical measure},
  author = {Samuel N. Cohen and Martin N. A. Tegnér and Johannes Wiesel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.02006},
  year   = {2019}
}