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Related papers: Statistical Aspects of Wasserstein Distances

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This paper studies iterative schemes for measure transfer and approximation problems, which are defined through a slicing-and-matching procedure. Similar to the sliced Wasserstein distance, these schemes benefit from the availability of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Shiying Li , Caroline Moosmueller , Yongzhe Wang

Many scientific systems, such as cellular populations or economic cohorts, are naturally described by probability distributions that evolve over time. Predicting how such a system would have evolved under different forces or initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-26 Tristan Luca Saidi , Gonzalo Mena , Larry Wasserman , Florian Gunsilius

Leveraging the Wasserstein distance -- a summation of sample-wise transport distances in data space -- is advantageous in many applications for measuring support differences between two underlying density functions. However, when supports…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Cheongjae Jang , Jonghyun Won , Soyeon Jun , Chun Kee Chung , Keehyoung Joo , Yung-Kyun Noh

We establish novel quantitative stability results for optimal transport problems with respect to perturbations in the target measure. We provide explicit bounds on the stability of optimal transport potentials and maps, which are relevant…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Octave Mischler , Dario Trevisan

Probability distributions play a central role in quantum mechanics, and even more so in quantum optics with its rich diversity of theoretically conceivable and experimentally accessible quantum states of light. Quantifiers that compare two…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-21 Soumyabrata Paul , V. Balakrishnan , S. Ramanan , S. Lakshmibala

We define the quantum Wasserstein distance such that the optimization of the coupling is carried out over bipartite separable states rather than bipartite quantum states in general, and examine its properties. Surprisingly, we find that the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-10-17 Géza Tóth , József Pitrik

The Wasserstein distance, also known as the Earth mover distance or optimal transport distance, is a widely used measure of similarity between probability distributions. This paper presents an linear programming based implementation of the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-29 Zehao Lu

While the existing stochastic control theory is well equipped to handle dynamical systems with stochastic uncertainties, a paradigm shift using distance measure based decision making is required for the effective further exploration of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Venkatraman Renganathan , Sei Zhen Khong

We propose a methodology for intercomparing climate models and evaluating their performance against benchmarks based on the use of the Wasserstein distance (WD). This distance provides a rigorous way to measure quantitatively the difference…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2020-11-16 Gabriele Vissio , Valerio Lembo , Valerio Lucarini , Michael Ghil

The Bregman-Wasserstein divergence is the optimal transport cost when the underlying cost function is given by a Bregman divergence, and arises naturally in fields such as statistics and machine learning. We establish fundamental properties…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-04-14 Amanjit Singh Kainth , Cale Rankin , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

In the context of kernel methods, the similarity between data points is encoded by the kernel function which is often defined thanks to the Euclidean distance, a common example being the squared exponential kernel. Recently, other distances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-06 Henri De Plaen , Michaël Fanuel , Johan A. K. Suykens

This paper studies distributional model risk in marginal problems, where each marginal measure is assumed to lie in a Wasserstein ball centered at a fixed reference measure with a given radius. Theoretically, we establish several…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-04 Yanqin Fan , Hyeonseok Park , Gaoqian Xu

We consider distributionally robust optimization problems where the uncertainty is modeled via a structured Wasserstein ambiguity set. Specifically, the ambiguity is restricted to product measures $P^{\otimes N}$, where $P$ lies within a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Andrey Kharitenko , Marta Fochesato , Anastasios Tsiamis , Niklas Schmid , John Lygeros

Wasserstein distances are increasingly used in a wide variety of applications in machine learning. Sliced Wasserstein distances form an important subclass which may be estimated efficiently through one-dimensional sorting operations. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-08 Mark Rowland , Jiri Hron , Yunhao Tang , Krzysztof Choromanski , Tamas Sarlos , Adrian Weller

Clustering is an important exploratory data analysis technique to group objects based on their similarity. The widely used $K$-means clustering method relies on some notion of distance to partition data into a fewer number of groups. In the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-14 Yubo Zhuang , Xiaohui Chen , Yun Yang

We consider stochastic programs where the distribution of the uncertain parameters is only observable through a finite training dataset. Using the Wasserstein metric, we construct a ball in the space of (multivariate and non-discrete)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-14 Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Daniel Kuhn

Optimal transport and the Wasserstein distance $\mathcal{W}_p$ have recently seen a number of applications in the fields of statistics, machine learning, data science, and the physical sciences. These applications are however severely…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-24 Ruiyu Han , Cynthia Rush , Johannes Wiesel

In the past couple of years, various approaches to representing and quantifying different types of predictive uncertainty in machine learning, notably in the setting of classification, have been proposed on the basis of second-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yusuf Sale , Viktor Bengs , Michele Caprio , Eyke Hüllermeier

Projection robust Wasserstein (PRW) distance, or Wasserstein projection pursuit (WPP), is a robust variant of the Wasserstein distance. Recent work suggests that this quantity is more robust than the standard Wasserstein distance, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-03 Tianyi Lin , Chenyou Fan , Nhat Ho , Marco Cuturi , Michael I. Jordan

The prior distribution is a crucial building block in Bayesian analysis, and its choice will impact the subsequent inference. It is therefore important to have a convenient way to quantify this impact, as such a measure of prior impact will…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-26 Fatemeh Ghaderinezhad , Christophe Ley , Ben Serrien