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Optimal transport provides a powerful mathematical framework with applications spanning numerous fields. A cornerstone within this domain is the $p$-Wasserstein distance, which serves to quantify the cost of transporting one probability…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-13 Emily Beatty , Daniel Stilck França

Discrepancy measures between probability distributions, often termed statistical distances, are ubiquitous in probability theory, statistics and machine learning. To combat the curse of dimensionality when estimating these distances from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-21 Sloan Nietert , Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato

Optimal transport (\OT) theory defines a powerful set of tools to compare probability distributions. \OT~suffers however from a few drawbacks, computational and statistical, which have encouraged the proposal of several regularized variants…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Tam Le , Makoto Yamada , Kenji Fukumizu , Marco Cuturi

Two geometrical structures have been extensively studied for a manifold of probability distributions. One is based on the Fisher information metric, which is invariant under reversible transformations of random variables, while the other is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-10-02 Shun-ichi Amari , Ryo Karakida , Masafumi Oizumi

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

We address the problem of efficiently computing Wasserstein distances for multiple pairs of distributions drawn from a meta-distribution. To this end, we propose a fast estimation method based on regressing Wasserstein distance on sliced…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Khai Nguyen , Hai Nguyen , Nhat Ho

The quantum Wasserstein distance (W-distance) is a fundamental metric for quantifying the distinguishability of quantum operations, with critical applications in quantum error correction. However, computing the W-distance remains…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-18 Changchun Feng , Xinyu Qiu , Laifa Tao , Lin Chen

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

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 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

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

Estimating a $d$-dimensional distribution $\mu$ by the empirical measure $\hat{\mu}_n$ of its samples is an important task in probability theory, statistics and machine learning. It is well known that $\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{W}_p(\hat{\mu}_n,…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Martin Larsson , Jonghwa Park , Johannes Wiesel

This paper studies the optimality of kernel methods in high-dimensional data clustering. Recent works have studied the large sample performance of kernel clustering in the high-dimensional regime, where Euclidean distance becomes less…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Leena Chennuru Vankadara , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

Assume that we observe i.i.d.~points lying close to some unknown $d$-dimensional $\mathcal{C}^k$ submanifold $M$ in a possibly high-dimensional space. We study the problem of reconstructing the probability distribution generating the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Vincent Divol

Motivated by the statistical and computational challenges of computing Wasserstein distances in high-dimensional contexts, machine learning researchers have defined modified Wasserstein distances based on computing distances between…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-06-02 Jiaqi Xi , Jonathan Niles-Weed

This paper focuses on a similarity measure, known as the Wasserstein distance, with which to compare images. The Wasserstein distance results from a partial differential equation (PDE) formulation of Monge's optimal transport problem. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Michael Snow , Jan Van lent

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

Representing, comparing, and measuring the distance between probability distributions is a key task in computational statistics and machine learning. The choice of representation and the associated distance determine properties of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-26 Masha Naslidnyk

We develop a general framework for statistical inference with the 1-Wasserstein distance. Recently, the Wasserstein distance has attracted considerable attention and has been widely applied to various machine learning tasks because of its…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-16 Masaaki Imaizumi , Hirofumi Ota , Takuo Hamaguchi

Sliced Wasserstein (SW) distances offer an efficient method for comparing high-dimensional probability measures by projecting them onto multiple 1-dimensional probability distributions. However, identifying informative slicing directions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Darian Salehi , Xinran Liu , Soheil Kolouri