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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

We study the problem of estimating a sequence of evolving probability distributions from historical data, where the underlying distribution changes over time in a nonstationary and nonparametric manner. To capture gradual changes, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Edward J. Anderson , Dominic S. T. Keehan

The Wasserstein distance is an attractive tool for data analysis but statistical inference is hindered by the lack of distributional limits. To overcome this obstacle, for probability measures supported on finitely many points, we derive…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-27 Max Sommerfeld , Axel Munk

It was recently shown that under smoothness conditions, the squared Wasserstein distance between two distributions could be efficiently computed with appealing statistical error upper bounds. However, rather than the distance itself, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-30 Boris Muzellec , Adrien Vacher , Francis Bach , François-Xavier Vialard , Alessandro Rudi

Resource-efficiently computing representations of probability distributions and the distances between them while only having access to the samples is a fundamental and useful problem across mathematical sciences. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Debabrota Basu , Debarshi Chanda

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

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

Suppose we are given two metric spaces and a family of continuous transformations from one to the other. Given a probability distribution on each of these two spaces - namely the source and the target measures - the Wasserstein alignment…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Soumik Pal , Bodhisattva Sen , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

We introduce LOT Wassmap, a computationally feasible algorithm to uncover low-dimensional structures in the Wasserstein space. The algorithm is motivated by the observation that many datasets are naturally interpreted as probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Alexander Cloninger , Keaton Hamm , Varun Khurana , Caroline Moosmüller

Comparing probability distributions is at the crux of many machine learning algorithms. Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Wasserstein distances are two classes of distances between probability distributions that have attracted abundant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Titouan Vayer , Rémi Gribonval

The sliced Wasserstein (SW) distances between two probability measures are defined as the expectation of the Wasserstein distance between two one-dimensional projections of the two measures. The randomness comes from a projecting direction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Khai Nguyen , Nhat Ho

We analyze the Wasserstein distance ($W$-distance) between two probability distributions associated with two multidimensional jump-diffusion processes. Specifically, we analyze a temporally decoupled squared $W_2$-distance, which provides…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-05 Mingtao Xia , Xiangting Li , Qijing Shen , Tom Chou

A growing number of generative statistical models do not permit the numerical evaluation of their likelihood functions. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has become a popular approach to overcome this issue, in which one simulates…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-05-10 Espen Bernton , Pierre E. Jacob , Mathieu Gerber , Christian P. Robert

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-04 Van Chien Ta , Thi Mai Hong Chu , Minh-Ngoc Tran

We study nonparametric density estimation problems where error is measured in the Wasserstein distance, a metric on probability distributions popular in many areas of statistics and machine learning. We give the first minimax-optimal rates…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-30 Jonathan Niles-Weed , Quentin Berthet

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth using topological summaries, especially the persistence diagrams (encoding the so-called persistent homology) for analyzing complex shapes. Intuitively, persistent homology maps a potentially…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2021-04-19 Samantha Chen , Yusu Wang

In this paper, we consider the problem of propagating an uncertain distribution by a possibly non-linear function and quantifying the resulting uncertainty. We measure the uncertainty using the Wasserstein distance, and for a given input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-13 Eduardo Figueiredo , Steven Adams , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Luca Laurenti

Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) distances compare graphs, shapes, and point clouds through internal distances, without requiring a common coordinate system. This invariance is powerful, but discrete GW is a nonconvex quadratic optimal transport…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Ao Xu , Tieru Wu

We present a highly effective algorithmic approach for generating $\varepsilon$-differentially private synthetic data in a bounded metric space with near-optimal utility guarantees under the 1-Wasserstein distance. In particular, for a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Yiyun He , Roman Vershynin , Yizhe Zhu

The 2-Wasserstein distance (or RMS distance) is a useful measure of similarity between probability distributions that has exciting applications in machine learning. For discrete distributions, the problem of computing this distance can be…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Nathaniel Lahn , Sharath Raghvendra