English
Related papers

Related papers: Entropic optimal transport is maximum-likelihood d…

200 papers

The method of Maximum (relative) Entropy (ME) is used to translate the information contained in the known form of the likelihood into a prior distribution for Bayesian inference. The argument is guided by intuition gained from the…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-11-10 Ariel Caticha , Roland Preuss

This note outlines a mean-field approach to dynamic optimal transport problems based on the recently proposed McKean-Pontryagin maximum principle. Key aspects of the proposed methodology include i) avoidance of sampling over stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Sebastian Reich

We study the convergence of entropically regularized optimal transport to optimal transport. The main result is concerned with the convergence of the associated optimizers and takes the form of a large deviations principle quantifying the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-25 Espen Bernton , Promit Ghosal , Marcel Nutz

In this paper, we present a novel and principled approach to learn the optimal transport between two distributions, from samples. Guided by the optimal transport theory, we learn the optimal Kantorovich potential which induces the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Ashok Vardhan Makkuva , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Sewoong Oh , Jason D. Lee

We introduce a novel optimal transport framework for probabilistic circuits (PCs). While it has been shown recently that divergences between distributions represented as certain classes of PCs can be computed tractably, to the best of our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Adrian Ciotinga , YooJung Choi

Optimal transportation theory and the related $p$-Wasserstein distance ($W_p$, $p\geq 1$) are widely-applied in statistics and machine learning. In spite of their popularity, inference based on these tools has some issues. For instance, it…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-01 Yiming Ma , Hang Liu , Davide La Vecchia , Metthieu Lerasle

The notion of entropy-regularized optimal transport, also known as Sinkhorn divergence, has recently gained popularity in machine learning and statistics, as it makes feasible the use of smoothed optimal transportation distances for data…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Jérémie Bigot , Elsa Cazelles , Nicolas Papadakis

We generalize the well-known mixtures of Gaussians approach to density estimation and the accompanying Expectation--Maximization technique for finding the maximum likelihood parameters of the mixture to the case where each data point…

Methodology · Statistics 2011-08-01 Jo Bovy , David W. Hogg , Sam T. Roweis

We propose an overview of optimal transport theory and its applications to econometric methodology. This review is specifically designed for practitioners, be they econometric theorists or applied econometricians. The review of applications…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-07 Alfred Galichon , Marc Henry

We develop a new methodology for model-based clustering. Optimizing the log-likelihood provides a principled statistical framework for clustering, with solutions found via the EM algorithm. However, because the log-likelihood is nonconvex,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-06 Gonzalo Mena

Optimal transport (OT) serves as a natural framework for comparing probability measures, with applications in statistics, machine learning, and applied mathematics. Alas, statistical estimation and exact computation of the OT distances…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-14 Tao Wang , Ziv Goldfeld

In many statistical settings, two types of data are available: coupled data, which preserve the joint structure among variables but are limited in size due to cost or privacy constraints, and marginal data, which are available at larger…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jakwang Kim , Young-Heon Kim , Chan Park

We consider Monge-Kantorovich optimal transport problems on $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d\ge 1$, with a convex cost function given by the cumulant generating function of a probability measure. Examples include the Wasserstein-2 transport whose cost…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-08-29 Soumik Pal

Replacing positivity constraints by an entropy barrier is popular to approximate solutions of linear programs. In the special case of the optimal transport problem, this technique dates back to the early work of Schr\"odinger. This approach…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2017-01-10 Guillaume Carlier , Vincent Duval , Gabriel Peyré , Bernhard Schmitzer

We derive limit distributions for certain empirical regularized optimal transport distances between probability distributions supported on a finite metric space and show consistency of the (naive) bootstrap. In particular, we prove that the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-02 Marcel Klatt , Carla Tameling , Axel Munk

We consider the optimal mass transportation problem in $\RR^d$ with measurably parameterized marginals, for general cost functions and under conditions ensuring the existence of a unique optimal transport map. We prove a joint measurability…

Probability · Mathematics 2008-09-09 Joaquin Fontbona , Helene Guerin , Sylvie Meleard

We investigate the estimation of an optimal transport map between probability measures on an infinite-dimensional space and reveal its minimax optimal rate. Optimal transport theory defines distances within a space of probability measures,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Donlapark Ponnoprat , Masaaki Imaizumi

This paper shows how to evolve numerically the maximum entropy probability distributions for a given set of constraints, which is a variational calculus problem. An evolutionary algorithm can obtain approximations to some well-known…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-07 Raul Rojas

The adapted Wasserstein distance is a metric for quantifying distributional uncertainty and assessing the sensitivity of stochastic optimization problems on time series data. A computationally efficient alternative to it, is provided by the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-10 Beatrice Acciaio , Songyan Hou , Gudmund Pammer

We study the problem of estimating a function $T$ given independent samples from a distribution $P$ and from the pushforward distribution $T_\sharp P$. This setting is motivated by applications in the sciences, where $T$ represents the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Vincent Divol , Jonathan Niles-Weed , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian