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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

This paper studies the expected optimal value of a mixed 0-1 programming problem with uncertain objective coefficients following a joint distribution. We assume that the true distribution is not known exactly, but a set of independent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-28 Guanglin Xu , Samuel Burer

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

Distributionally robust supervised learning (DRSL) is emerging as a key paradigm for building reliable machine learning systems for real-world applications -- reflecting the need for classifiers and predictive models that are robust to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Yaodong Yu , Tianyi Lin , Eric Mazumdar , Michael I. Jordan

The Wasserstein distance is a metric on a space of probability measures that has seen a surge of applications in statistics, machine learning, and applied mathematics. However, statistical aspects of Wasserstein distances are bottlenecked…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-03-02 Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato , Sloan Nietert , Gabriel Rioux

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

A novel framework for density estimation under expectation constraints is proposed. The framework minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the estimated density and a prior, subject to the constraints that the expected value of a set of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-24 Yinan Hu , Esteban G. Tabak

The asymptotic normality of the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) is a long established result. Explicit bounds for the distributional distance between the distribution of the MLE and the normal distribution have recently been obtained for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-09-20 Andreas Anastasiou

The subject of this paper is the estimation of a probability measure on ${\mathbb R}^d$ from data observed with an additive noise, under the Wasserstein metric of order $p$ (with $p\geq 1$). We assume that the distribution of the errors is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-07-22 Jérôme Dedecker , Bertrand Michel

Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization (EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However, EM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-11-17 Soheil Kolouri , Gustavo K. Rohde , Heiko Hoffmann

We are interested in the approximation in Wasserstein distance with index $\rho\ge 1$ of a probability measure $\mu$ on the real line with finite moment of order $\rho$ by the empirical measure of $N$ deterministic points. The minimal error…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-05-07 Oumaima Bencheikh , Benjamin Jourdain

We consider the problem of sampling from a distribution governed by a potential function. This work proposes an explicit score based MCMC method that is deterministic, resulting in a deterministic evolution for particles rather than a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Hong Ye Tan , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-05 Yuling Yan , Kaizheng Wang , Philippe Rigollet

In this work, we study the maximum matching problem from the perspective of sensitivity. The sensitivity of an algorithm $A$ on a graph $G$ is defined as the maximum Wasserstein distance between the output distributions of $A$ on $G$ and on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yuichi Yoshida , Zihan Zhang

Group-invariant probability distributions appear in many data-generative models in machine learning, such as graphs, point clouds, and images. In practice, one often needs to estimate divergences between such distributions. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Behrooz Tahmasebi , Stefanie Jegelka

Many machine learning problems can be seen as approximating a \textit{target} distribution using a \textit{particle} distribution by minimizing their statistical discrepancy. Wasserstein Gradient Flow can move particles along a path that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-07 Song Liu , Jiahao Yu , Jack Simons , Mingxuan Yi , Mark Beaumont

A wide array of machine learning problems are formulated as the minimization of the expectation of a convex loss function on some parameter space. Since the probability distribution of the data of interest is usually unknown, it is is often…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Emilie Chouzenoux , Henri Gérard , Jean-Christophe Pesquet

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

Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-11 Rentian Yao , Yun Yang

Given a determinate (multivariate) probability measure $\mu$, we characterize Gaussian mixtures $\nu\_\phi$ which minimize the Wasserstein distance $W\_2(\mu,\nu\_\phi)$ to $\mu$ when the mixing probability measure $\phi$ on the parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Jean-Bernard Lasserre