Transportation Distance and the Central Limit Theorem

When studying convergence of measures, an important issue is the choice of probability metric. In this review, we provide a summary and some new results concerning bounds among ten important probability metrics/distances that are used by statisticians and probabilists. We focus on these metrics because they are either well-known, commonly used, or admit practical bounding techniques. We summarize these relationships in a handy reference diagram, and also give examples to show...

The contribution of this work is twofold. The first part deals with a Hilbert-space version of McCann's celebrated result on the existence and uniqueness of monotone measure-preserving maps: given two probability measures $\rm P$ and $\rm Q$ on a separable Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$ where $\rm P$ does not give mass to "small sets" (namely, Lipschitz hypersurfaces), we show, without imposing any moment assumptions, that there exists a gradient of convex function $\nabla\psi$ ...

We study measurable dependence of measures on a parameter in the following two classical problems: constructing conditional measures and the Kantorovich optimal transportation. We obtain broad sufficient conditions for the existence of conditional probabilities measurably depending on a parameter in the case of parametric families of measures and mappings. A~particular emphasis is made on the Borel measurability (which cannot be always achieved). Our second main result gives ...

We study Kantorovich type optimal transportation problems with nonlinear cost functions, including dependence on conditional measures of transport plans. A range of nonlinear Kantorovich problems for cost functions of a special form is considered and results on existence (or non-existence) of optimal solutions are proved. We also establish the connection between the nonlinear Kantorovich problem with the cost function of some special form and the Monge problem with convex dom...

The short history of L.Kantorovich's transport problem and his metric in the framework of his activity in mathmatics and economics during a long and difficult period. We did not mention the recent impetuious developement of application of the transport probelm to differential equations etc., and concentrated on three applications not known to wide audience - in measure and ergodic theory, and metric geometry and classification of mertric spaces with measures. This is a deta...

Wasserstein barycentres represent average distributions between multiple probability measures for the Wasserstein distance. The numerical computation of Wasserstein barycentres is notoriously challenging. A common approach is to use Sinkhorn iterations, where an entropic regularisation term is introduced to make the problem more manageable. Another approach involves using fixed-point methods, akin to those employed for computing Fr\'echet means on manifolds. The convergence o...

This article is dedicated to the estimation of Wasserstein distances and Wasserstein costs between two distinct continuous distributions $F$ and $G$ on $\mathbb R$. The estimator is based on the order statistics of (possibly dependent) samples of $F$ resp. $G$. We prove the consistency and the asymptotic normality of our estimators. \begin{it}Keywords:\end{it} Central Limit Theorems- Generelized Wasserstein distances- Empirical processes- Strong approximation- Dependent sampl...

In this paper, we consider Strassen's version of optimal transport (OT) problem, which concerns minimizing the excess-cost probability (i.e., the probability that the cost is larger than a given value) over all couplings of two given distributions. We derive large deviation, moderate deviation, and central limit theorems for this problem. Our proof is based on Strassen's dual formulation of the OT problem, Sanov's theorem on the large deviation principle (LDP) of empirical me...

We develop a full theory for the new class of Optimal Entropy-Transport problems between nonnegative and finite Radon measures in general topological spaces. They arise quite naturally by relaxing the marginal constraints typical of Optimal Transport problems: given a couple of finite measures (with possibly different total mass), one looks for minimizers of the sum of a linear transport functional and two convex entropy functionals, that quantify in some way the deviation ...

We introduce a general notion of transport cost that encompasses many costs used in the literature (including the classical one and weak transport costs introduced by Talagrand and Marton in the 90's), and prove a Kantorovich type duality theorem. As a by-product we obtain various applications in different directions: we give a short proof of a result by Strassen on the existence of a martingale with given marginals, we characterize the associated transport-entropy inequaliti...