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Wasserstein barycentres represent average distributions between multiple probability measures for the Wasserstein distance. The numerical computation of Wasserstein barycentres is notoriously challenging. A common approach is to use…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-30 Eloi Tanguy , Julie Delon , Nathaël Gozlan

Wasserstein metrics are increasingly being used as similarity scores for images treated as discrete measures on a grid, yet their behavior under noise remains poorly understood. In this work, we consider the sensitivity of the signed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Erik Lager , Gilles Mordant , Amit Moscovich

Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) provides a principled framework for selecting observations or experiments. We introduce new Bayesian design criteria based on the expected Wasserstein-$p$ distance between the prior and posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-28 Tapio Helin , Youssef Marzouk , Jose Rodrigo Rojo-Garcia

Motivated by the growing popularity of variants of the Wasserstein distance in statistics and machine learning, we study statistical inference for the Sliced Wasserstein distance--an easily computable variant of the Wasserstein distance.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-04-05 Tudor Manole , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Larry Wasserman

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

This paper proposes two algorithms for estimating square Wasserstein distance matrices from a small number of entries. These matrices are used to compute manifold learning embeddings like multidimensional scaling (MDS) or Isomap, but…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Muhammad Rana , Abiy Tasissa , HanQin Cai , Yakov Gavriyelov , Keaton Hamm

The Wasserstein barycenter extends the Euclidean mean to the space of probability measures by minimizing the weighted sum of squared 2-Wasserstein distances. We develop a free-support algorithm for computing Wasserstein barycenters that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-17 Kisung You

Embedding complex objects as vectors in low dimensional spaces is a longstanding problem in machine learning. We propose in this work an extension of that approach, which consists in embedding objects as elliptical probability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-19 Boris Muzellec , Marco Cuturi

This note is a continuation of the author's previous work on "Sharp bounds for the max-sliced Wasserstein distance." We use the same technique to obtain an upper bound for the expected max-sliced 2-Wasserstein distance between a compactly…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-03-18 March T. Boedihardjo

We propose a new statistical model, the spiked transport model, which formalizes the assumption that two probability distributions differ only on a low-dimensional subspace. We study the minimax rate of estimation for the Wasserstein…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-18 Jonathan Niles-Weed , Philippe Rigollet

The Wasserstein distance has been an attractive tool in many fields. But due to its high computational complexity and the phenomenon of the curse of dimensionality in empirical estimation, various extensions of the Wasserstein distance have…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Xianliang Xu , Zhongyi Huang

The primary choice to summarize a finite collection of random objects is by using measures of central tendency, such as mean and median. In the field of optimal transport, the Wasserstein barycenter corresponds to the Fr\'{e}chet or…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-03 Kisung You , Dennis Shung , Mauro Giuffrè

Computing the unregularized Wasserstein barycenter for measure-valued data is a challenging optimization task. Recent algorithms have been tailored to either discrete measures as point clouds or continuous measures discretized on regular…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Peng Xu , Changbo Zhu , Xiaohui Chen

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

Sliced Wasserstein distances are widely used in practice as a computationally efficient alternative to Wasserstein distances in high dimensions. In this paper, motivated by theoretical foundations of this alternative, we prove quantitative…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Guillaume Carlier , Alessio Figalli , Quentin Mérigot , Yi Wang

In this paper, we establish sharp upper and lower bounds on the convergence rate of the empirical measures of point processes under the Wasserstein distance. To this end, we first introduce a new metric on the space of counting measures…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Dongzhou Huang , Tianyi Jiang , Haonan Wang

Wasserstein barycenter is the centroid of a collection of discrete probability distributions which minimizes the average of the $\ell_2$-Wasserstein distance. This paper focuses on the computation of Wasserstein barycenters under the case…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-19 Yitian Qian , Shaohua Pan

The Wasserstein distance is a distance between two probability distributions and has recently gained increasing popularity in statistics and machine learning, owing to its attractive properties. One important approach to extending this…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-14 Ryo Okano , Masaaki Imaizumi

In this work, we propose a method for computing centroids, or barycenters, in the spectral Wasserstein-2 metric for sets of power spectral densities, where the barycenters are restricted to belong to the set of all-pole spectra with a…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-17 Rumeshika Pallewela , Filip Elvander

Computing the Wasserstein barycenter of a set of probability measures under the optimal transport metric can quickly become prohibitive for traditional second-order algorithms, such as interior-point methods, as the support size of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-22 Dongdong Ge , Haoyue Wang , Zikai Xiong , Yinyu Ye