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Distances between probability distributions of different dimensions

Statistics Theory 2022-02-01 v3 Information Theory math.IT Probability Statistics Theory

Abstract

Comparing probability distributions is an indispensable and ubiquitous task in machine learning and statistics. The most common way to compare a pair of Borel probability measures is to compute a metric between them, and by far the most widely used notions of metric are the Wasserstein metric and the total variation metric. The next most common way is to compute a divergence between them, and in this case almost every known divergences such as those of Kullback--Leibler, Jensen--Shannon, R\'enyi, and many more, are special cases of the ff-divergence. Nevertheless these metrics and divergences may only be computed, in fact, are only defined, when the pair of probability measures are on spaces of the same dimension. How would one quantify, say, a KL-divergence between the uniform distribution on the interval [1,1][-1,1] and a Gaussian distribution on R3\mathbb{R}^3? We show that these common notions of metrics and divergences give rise to natural distances between Borel probability measures defined on spaces of different dimensions, e.g., one on Rm\mathbb{R}^m and another on Rn\mathbb{R}^n where m,nm, n are distinct, so as to give a meaningful answer to the previous question.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.00629,
  title  = {Distances between probability distributions of different dimensions},
  author = {Yuhang Cai and Lek-Heng Lim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.00629},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

12 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:49:38.321Z