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We consider the optimization problem of minimizing a functional defined over a family of probability distributions, where the objective functional is assumed to possess a variational form. Such a distributional optimization problem arises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Zhuoran Yang , Yufeng Zhang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

Assume that we observe i.i.d.~points lying close to some unknown $d$-dimensional $\mathcal{C}^k$ submanifold $M$ in a possibly high-dimensional space. We study the problem of reconstructing the probability distribution generating the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Vincent Divol

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

The standard quadratic optimization problem (StQP) consists of minimizing a quadratic form over the standard simplex. Without assuming convexity or concavity of the quadratic form, the StQP is NP-hard. This problem has many interesting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-09 Immanuel M. Bomze , Daniel de Vicente , Abdel Lisser , Heng Zhang

The goal of scenario reduction is to approximate a given discrete distribution with another discrete distribution that has fewer atoms. We distinguish continuous scenario reduction, where the new atoms may be chosen freely, and discrete…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-01-17 Napat Rujeerapaiboon , Kilian Schindler , Daniel Kuhn , Wolfram Wiesemann

We suggest that the tools of contraction analysis for deterministic systems can be applied towards studying the convergence behavior of stochastic dynamical systems in the Wasserstein metric. In particular, we consider the case of Ito…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-01 Jake Bouvrie , Jean-Jacques Slotine

Generative modelling is often cast as minimizing a similarity measure between a data distribution and a model distribution. Recently, a popular choice for the similarity measure has been the Wasserstein metric, which can be expressed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Anton Mallasto , Guido Montúfar , Augusto Gerolin

We consider a random walk $S_k$ with i.i.d. steps on a compact group equipped with a bi-invariant metric. We prove quantitative ergodic theorems for the sum $\sum_{k=1}^N f(S_k)$ with H\"older continuous test functions $f$, including the…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-09-27 Bence Borda

The problem of modeling the relationship between univariate distributions and one or more explanatory variables has found increasing interest. Traditional functional data methods cannot be applied directly to distributional data because of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-04 Yidong Zhou , Hans-Georg Müller

Optimal transport is a foundational problem in optimization, that allows to compare probability distributions while taking into account geometric aspects. Its optimal objective value, the Wasserstein distance, provides an important loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Marin Ballu , Quentin Berthet , Francis Bach

Using statistical learning methods to analyze stochastic simulation outputs can significantly enhance decision-making by uncovering relationships between different simulated systems and between a system's inputs and outputs. We focus on…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-28 Mohammadmahdi Ghasemloo , David J. Eckman

The success of autoregressive models largely depends on the effectiveness of vector quantization, a technique that discretizes continuous features by mapping them to the nearest code vectors within a learnable codebook. Two critical issues…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Xianghong Fang , Litao Guo , Hengchao Chen , Yuxuan Zhang , XiaofanXia , Dingjie Song , Yexin Liu , Hao Wang , Harry Yang , Yuan Yuan , Qiang Sun

In this work we consider regularized Wasserstein barycenters (average in Wasserstein distance) in Fourier basis. We prove that random Fourier parameters of the barycenter converge to some Gaussian random vector by distribution. The…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-21 Nazar Buzun

Data consisting of time-indexed distributions of cross-sectional or intraday returns have been extensively studied in finance, and provide one example in which the data atoms consist of serially dependent probability distributions.…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-24 Chao Zhang , Piotr Kokoszka , Alexander Petersen

This paper is focused on the statistical analysis of data consisting of a collection of multiple series of probability measures that are indexed by distinct time instants and supported over a bounded interval of the real line. By modeling…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Yiye Jiang , Jérémie Bigot

Diffusion theory is a central tool of modern population genetics, yielding simple expressions for fixation probabilities and other quantities that are not easily derived from the underlying Wright-Fisher model. Unfortunately, the textbook…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2022-12-19 Camila Bräutigam , Matteo Smerlak

We describe society as a nonequilibrium probabilistic system: N individuals occupy W resource states in it and produce entropy S over definite time periods. Resulting thermodynamics is however unusual because a second entropy, H, measures a…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2019-02-20 J. Rosenblatt

We study the discretization of generalized Wasserstein distances with nonlinear mobilities on the real line via suitable discrete metrics on the cone of N ordered particles, a setting which naturally appears in the framework of…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2022-09-01 Simone Di Marino , Lorenzo Portinale , Emanuela Radici

Wasserstein \textbf{D}istributionally \textbf{R}obust \textbf{O}ptimization (DRO) is concerned with finding decisions that perform well on data that are drawn from the worst-case probability distribution within a Wasserstein ball centered…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-27 Jiajin Li , Caihua Chen , Anthony Man-Cho So

In this paper we consider a population process evolving on a dynamic random graph. The dynamic random graph is an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi graph that is resampled every time unit, independently of the previous ones, with `edge existence…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Peter Braunsteins , Michel Mandjes , Florian Montalescot