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Related papers: Statistical Aspects of Wasserstein Distances

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We study nonparametric density estimation problems where error is measured in the Wasserstein distance, a metric on probability distributions popular in many areas of statistics and machine learning. We give the first minimax-optimal rates…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-30 Jonathan Niles-Weed , Quentin Berthet

Controlling the $\mathcal W_\infty$ Wasserstein distance by the $\mathcal W_p$ Wasserstein distance is interesting both for theorical and numerical applications. A first paper on this problem was written several years ago [3]. Some year…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Luigi De Pascale , Igor Pinheiro

The Wasserstein distance between probability measures on compact spaces provides a natural invariant quantitative measure of equidistribution, which is partly similar to the classical discrepancy appearing in Erd\"os-Tur\'an type…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-29 Emmanuel Kowalski , Théo Untrau

Optimal transport and Wasserstein distances are flourishing in many scientific fields as a means for comparing and connecting random structures. Here we pioneer the use of an optimal transport distance between L\'{e}vy measures to solve a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-18 Marta Catalano , Hugo Lavenant , Antonio Lijoi , Igor Prünster

Since the introduction of the Sliced Wasserstein distance in the literature, its simplicity and efficiency have made it one of the most interesting surrogate for the Wasserstein distance in image processing and machine learning. However,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Eloi Tanguy , Laetitia Chapel , Julie Delon

Optimal transport distances are powerful tools to compare probability distributions and have found many applications in machine learning. Yet their algorithmic complexity prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Kilian Fatras , Younes Zine , Rémi Flamary , Rémi Gribonval , Nicolas Courty

Many decision problems in science, engineering and economics are affected by uncertain parameters whose distribution is only indirectly observable through samples. The goal of data-driven decision-making is to learn a decision from finitely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-05 Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Viet Anh Nguyen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh

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

Optimal transport has recently proved to be a useful tool in various machine learning applications needing comparisons of probability measures. Among these, applications of distributionally robust optimization naturally involve Wasserstein…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-24 Waïss Azizian , Franck Iutzeler , Jérôme Malick

Estimating the density of a distribution from samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. In many practical settings, the Wasserstein distance is an appropriate error metric for density estimation. For example, when estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Vitaly Feldman , Audra McMillan , Satchit Sivakumar , Kunal Talwar

The Wasserstein distance received a lot of attention recently in the community of machine learning, especially for its principled way of comparing distributions. It has found numerous applications in several hard problems, such as domain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-23 Nicolas Courty , Rémi Flamary , Mélanie Ducoffe

We introduce the observable Wasserstein distance, a framework for deriving lower bounds on the Wasserstein distance between probability measures on Polish metric spaces, designed to bypass the computational intractability of exact optimal…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Edivaldo Lopes dos Santos , Leandro Vicente Mauri , Washington Mio , Tom Needham

Suppose we are given two metric spaces and a family of continuous transformations from one to the other. Given a probability distribution on each of these two spaces - namely the source and the target measures - the Wasserstein alignment…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Soumik Pal , Bodhisattva Sen , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

The Wasserstein distance between mixing measures has come to occupy a central place in the statistical analysis of mixture models. This work proposes a new canonical interpretation of this distance and provides tools to perform inference on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-10 Xin Bing , Florentina Bunea , Jonathan Niles-Weed

Wasserstein distances define a metric between probability measures on arbitrary metric spaces, including meta-measures (measures over measures). The resulting Wasserstein over Wasserstein (WoW) distance is a powerful, but computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Moritz Piening , Robert Beinert

We define a modified Wasserstein distance for distribution clustering which inherits many of the properties of the Wasserstein distance but which can be estimated easily and computed quickly. The modified distance is the sum of two terms.…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-31 Isabella Verdinelli , Larry Wasserman

This article provides an overview on the statistical modeling of complex data as increasingly encountered in modern data analysis. It is argued that such data can often be described as elements of a metric space that satisfies certain…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-28 Paromita Dubey , Yaqing Chen , Hans-Georg Müller

Ranking distributions according to a stochastic order has wide applications in diverse areas. Although stochastic dominance has received much attention, convex order, particularly in general dimensions, has yet to be investigated from a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-15 Jakwang Kim , Young-Heon Kim , Yuanlong Ruan , Andrew Warren

In this paper we introduce a Wasserstein-type distance on the set of Gaussian mixture models. This distance is defined by restricting the set of possible coupling measures in the optimal transport problem to Gaussian mixture models. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-15 Julie Delon , Agnes Desolneux

The sliced Wasserstein distance as well as its variants have been widely considered in comparing probability measures defined on $\mathbb R^d$. Here we derive the notion of sliced Wasserstein distance for measures on an infinite dimensional…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2025-12-10 Ruiyu Han