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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

Uniformity testing and the more general identity testing are well studied problems in distributional property testing. Most previous work focuses on testing under $L_1$-distance. However, when the support is very large or even continuous,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-31 Shichuan Deng , Wenzheng Li , Xuan Wu

A consequence of de Finetti's representation theorem is that for every infinite sequence of exchangeable 0-1 random variables $(X_k)_{k\geq1}$, there exists a probability measure $\mu$ on the Borel sets of $[0,1]$ such that $\bar X_n =…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-01-26 Guillaume Mijoule , Giovanni Peccati , Yvik Swan

Gaussian smoothing has emerged as an effective technique for reducing the sample complexity of optimal transport. In this paper, we study the two-sample plug-in estimator of the Gaussian-smoothed Wasserstein cost…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Jiaping Yang , Yunxin Zhang

Particle-based variational inference offers a flexible way of approximating complex posterior distributions with a set of particles. In this paper we introduce a new particle-based variational inference method based on the theory of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-16 Luca Ambrogioni , Umut Guclu , Marcel van Gerven

In this article, we introduce a new approach towards the statistical learning problem $\operatorname{argmin}_{\rho(\theta) \in \mathcal P_{\theta}} W_{Q}^2 (\rho_{\star},\rho(\theta))$ to approximate a target quantum state $\rho_{\star}$ by…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2021-02-03 Simon Becker , Wuchen Li

We consider the population Wasserstein barycenter problem for random probability measures supported on a finite set of points and generated by an online stream of data. This leads to a complicated stochastic optimization problem where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-06 Daniil Tiapkin , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky

The discrete Wasserstein barycenter problem is a minimum-cost mass transport problem for a set of probability measures with finite support. In this paper, we show that finding a barycenter of sparse support is hard, even in dimension 2 and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-09 Steffen Borgwardt , Stephan Patterson

Squared Wasserstein distance is a frequently used tool to measure discrepancy between probability distributions. This distance is typically computed between empirical measures of size $n$ from two underlying random samples. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Peter Matthew Jacobs , Jeff M. Phillips

We study a distributionally robust mean square error estimation problem over a nonconvex Wasserstein ambiguity set containing only normal distributions. We show that the optimal estimator and the least favorable distribution form a Nash…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-02 Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Viet Anh Nguyen , Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

The smooth 1-Wasserstein distance (SWD) $W_1^\sigma$ was recently proposed as a means to mitigate the curse of dimensionality in empirical approximation while preserving the Wasserstein structure. Indeed, SWD exhibits parametric convergence…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-28 Ritwik Sadhu , Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato

Data represented by probability measures arise as empirical distributions, posterior distributions, and feature-based representations of complex objects. We study heterogeneity in a population of probability measures through the expected…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-17 Kisung You

We propose a framework, named Aggregated Wasserstein, for computing a dissimilarity measure or distance between two Hidden Markov Models with state conditional distributions being Gaussian. For such HMMs, the marginal distribution at any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Yukun Chen , Jianbo Ye , Jia Li

Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the-art performance in applications such as object recognition, speech recognition, and reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-29 Sherjil Ozair , Corey Lynch , Yoshua Bengio , Aaron van den Oord , Sergey Levine , Pierre Sermanet

Sampling from nonsmooth target probability distributions is essential in various applications, including the Bayesian Lasso. We propose a splitting-based sampling algorithm for the time-implicit discretization of the probability flow for…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-14 Fuqun Han , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

The two-sample homogeneity testing problem is fundamental in statistics and becomes particularly challenging in high dimensions, where classical tests can suffer substantial power loss. We develop a learning-assisted procedure based on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-30 Xiaoyu Hu , Zhenhua Lin

This manuscript introduces a regression-type formulation for approximating the Perron-Frobenius Operator by relying on distributional snapshots of data. These snapshots may represent densities of particles. The Wasserstein metric is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Amirhossein Karimi , Tryphon T. Georgiou

This paper introduces a new nonlinear dictionary learning method for histograms in the probability simplex. The method leverages optimal transport theory, in the sense that our aim is to reconstruct histograms using so-called displacement…

Importance sampling (IS) consists in biasing samples from a distribution $f$ towards another distribution $g$. Concretely, given samples $X_i$ from $f$, the IS measure is $$\hat{g}_n = \frac{1}{Z_n}\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{g(X_i)}{f(X_i)}…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Simon Coste , Michael Goldman

Consider the problem of estimating a multivariate normal mean with a known variance matrix, which is not necessarily proportional to the identity matrix. The coordinates are shrunk directly in proportion to their variances in Efron and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-05-29 Zhiqiang Tan