In this paper, a regularization of Wasserstein barycenters for random measures supported on @math is introduced via convex penalization. The existence and uniqueness of such barycenters is first proved for a large class of penalization functions. The Bregman divergence associated to the penalization term is then considered to obtain a stability result on penalized barycenters. This allows the comparison of data made of @math absolutely continuous probability measures, within the more realistic setting where one only has access to a dataset of random variables sampled from unknown distributions. The convergence of the penalized empirical barycenter of a set of @math iid random probability measures towards its population counterpart is finally analyzed. This approach is shown to be appropriate for the statistical analysis of either discrete or absolutely continuous random measures. It also allows to construct, from a set of discrete measures, consistent estimators of population Wasserstein barycenters that are absolutely continuous.
* Penalization of the transport map. Alternatively, regularized barycenters may be obtained by adding a convex regularization on optimal transport plans (that is on @math in ) when computing the Wasserstein distance between probability measures. This approach leads to the notion of regularized transportation problems and Wasserstein costs. It has recently gained popularity in the literature of image processing and machine learning and has been considered to compute smoothed Wasserstein barycenters of discrete measures @cite_19 @cite_21 . Such penalizations acting on transport plans nevertheless have an indirect influence on the regularity of the Wasserstein barycenter.
@cite_19 @cite_21
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We present new algorithms to compute the mean of a set of empirical probability measures under the optimal transport metric. This mean, known as the Wasserstein barycenter, is the measure that minimizes the sum of its Wasserstein distances to each element in that set. We propose two original algorithms to compute Wasserstein barycenters that build upon the subgradient method. A direct implementation of these algorithms is, however, too costly because it would require the repeated resolution of large primal and dual optimal transport problems to compute subgradients. Extending the work of Cuturi (2013), we propose to smooth the Wasserstein distance used in the definition of Wasserstein barycenters with an entropic regularizer and recover in doing so a strictly convex objective whose gradients can be computed for a considerably cheaper computational cost using matrix scaling algorithms. We use these algorithms to visualize a large family of images and to solve a constrained clustering problem. Wasserstein barycenters correspond to optimal solutions of transportation problems for several marginals, and as such have a wide range of applications ranging from economics to statistics and computer science. When the marginal probability measures are absolutely continuous (or vanish on small sets) the theory of Wasserstein barycenters is well-developed [see the seminal paper (Agueh and Carlier in SIAM J Math Anal 43(2):904–924, 2011)]. However, exact continuous computation of Wasserstein barycenters in this setting is tractable in only a small number of specialized cases. Moreover, in many applications data is given as a set of probability measures with finite support. In this paper, we develop theoretical results for Wasserstein barycenters in this discrete setting. Our results rely heavily on polyhedral theory which is possible due to the discrete structure of the marginals. The results closely mirror those in the continuous case with a few exceptions. In this discrete setting we establish that Wasserstein barycenters must also be discrete measures and there is always a barycenter which is provably sparse. Moreover, for each Wasserstein barycenter there exists a non-mass-splitting optimal transport to each of the discrete marginals. Such non-mass-splitting transports do not generally exist between two discrete measures unless special mass balance conditions hold. This makes Wasserstein barycenters in this discrete setting special in this regard. We illustrate the results of our discrete barycenter theory with a proof-of-concept computation for a hypothetical transportation problem with multiple marginals: distributing a fixed set of goods when the demand can take on different distributional shapes characterized by the discrete marginal distributions. A Wasserstein barycenter, in this case, represents an optimal distribution of inventory facilities which minimize the squared distance transportation cost totaled over all demands. Sliced Wasserstein metrics between probability measures solve the optimal transport (OT) problem on univariate projections, and average such maps across projections. The recent interest for the SW distance shows that much can be gained by looking at optimal maps between measures in smaller subspaces, as opposed to the curse-of-dimensionality price one has to pay in higher dimensions. Any transport estimated in a subspace remains, however, an object that can only be used in that subspace. We propose in this work two methods to extrapolate, from an transport map that is optimal on a subspace, one that is nearly optimal in the entire space. We prove that the best optimal transport plan that takes such "subspace detours" is a generalization of the Knothe-Rosenblatt transport. We show that these plans can be explicitly formulated when comparing Gaussians measures (between which the Wasserstein distance is usually referred to as the Bures or Fr 'echet distance). Building from there, we provide an algorithm to select optimal subspaces given pairs of Gaussian measures, and study scenarios in which that mediating subspace can be selected using prior information. We consider applications to NLP and evaluation of image quality (FID scores). We provide a framework to approximate the 2-Wasserstein distance and the optimal transport map, amenable to efficient training as well as statistical and geometric analysis. With the quadratic cost and considering the Kantorovich dual form of the optimal transportation problem, the Brenier theorem states that the optimal potential function is convex and the optimal transport map is the gradient of the optimal potential function. Using this geometric structure, we restrict the optimization problem to different parametrized classes of convex functions and pay special attention to the class of input-convex neural networks. We analyze the statistical generalization and the discriminative power of the resulting approximate metric, and we prove a restricted moment-matching property for the approximate optimal map. Finally, we discuss a numerical algorithm to solve the restricted optimization problem and provide numerical experiments to illustrate and compare the proposed approach with the established regularization-based approaches. We further discuss practical implications of our proposal in a modular and interpretable design for GANs which connects the generator training with discriminator computations to allow for learning an overall composite generator.