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Wasserstein distances are metrics on probability distributions inspired by the problem of optimal mass transportation. Roughly speaking, they measure the minimal effort required to reconfigure the probability mass of one distribution in…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-04-10 Victor M. Panaretos , Yoav Zemel

We provide a general steady-state diffusion approximation result which bounds the Wasserstein distance between the reversible measure $\mu$ of a diffusion process and the measure $\nu$ of an approximating Markov chain. Our result is…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-03-15 Thomas Bonis

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

The squared Wasserstein distance is a natural quantity to compare probability distributions in a non-parametric setting. This quantity is usually estimated with the plug-in estimator, defined via a discrete optimal transport problem which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Pierre Roussillon , Flavien Léger , François-Xavier Vialard , Gabriel Peyré

We present a constructive approach to surface comparison realizable by a polynomial-time algorithm. We determine the "similarity" of two given surfaces by solving a mass-transportation problem between their conformal densities. This mass…

Differential Geometry · Mathematics 2011-10-25 Yaron Lipman , Ingrid Daubechies

In inverse problems, many conditional generative models approximate the posterior measure by minimizing a distance between the joint measure and its learned approximation. While this approach also controls the distance between the posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Jannis Chemseddine , Paul Hagemann , Gabriele Steidl , Christian Wald

The Wasserstein distance between two probability measures on a metric space is a measure of closeness with applications in statistics, probability, and machine learning. In this work, we consider the fundamental question of how quickly the…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-07-04 Jonathan Weed , Francis Bach

Optimal transport has gained significant attention in recent years due to its effectiveness in deep learning and computer vision. Its descendant metric, the Wasserstein distance, has been particularly successful in measuring distribution…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-18 Kaiwen Shi

Making sense of Wasserstein distances between discrete measures in high-dimensional settings remains a challenge. Recent work has advocated a two-step approach to improve robustness and facilitate the computation of optimal transport, using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-04 François-Pierre Paty , Marco Cuturi

We introduce a principled way of computing the Wasserstein distance between two distributions in a federated manner. Namely, we show how to estimate the Wasserstein distance between two samples stored and kept on different devices/clients…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Alain Rakotomamonjy , Kimia Nadjahi , Liva Ralaivola

Persistence diagrams are a useful tool from topological data analysis which can be used to provide a concise description of a filtered topological space. What makes them even more useful in practice is that they come with a notion of a…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Jesse J. Berwald , Joel M. Gottlieb , Elizabeth Munch

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

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

In this work we study systems consisting of a group of moving particles. In such systems, often some important parameters are unknown and have to be estimated from observed data. Such parameter estimation problems can often be solved via a…

Applications · Statistics 2023-07-11 Chen Cheng , Linjie Wen , Jinglai Li

We build on the formalism developed in [arXiv:1906.08372v1] to propose new representations of solutions to Stein equations. We provide new uniform and non uniform bounds on these solutions (a.k.a.\ Stein factors). We use these…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-11-14 Marie Ernst , Yvik Swan

We propose a novel method for comparing non-aligned graphs of different sizes, based on the Wasserstein distance between graph signal distributions induced by the respective graph Laplacian matrices. Specifically, we cast a new formulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Hermina Petric Maretic , Mireille El Gheche , Matthias Minder , Giovanni Chierchia , Pascal Frossard

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

The Optimal Transport (a.k.a. Wasserstein) distance is an increasingly popular similarity measure for rich data domains, such as images or text documents. This raises the necessity for fast nearest neighbor search algorithms according to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Arturs Backurs , Yihe Dong , Piotr Indyk , Ilya Razenshteyn , Tal Wagner

Given two continuity equations with density-dependent velocities, we provide a new formula for the Wasserstein distance between the solutions in terms of the difference of velocities evaluated at the same density. The formula is…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-03-27 José A. Carrillo , Piotr Gwiazda , Jakub Skrzeczkowski

In this work, we provide non-asymptotic bounds for the average speed of convergence of the empirical measure in the law of large numbers, in Wasserstein distance. We also consider occupation measures of ergodic Markov chains. One motivation…

Probability · Mathematics 2011-05-27 Emmanuel Boissard , Thibaut Le Gouic