A novel notion of barycenter for probability distributions based on optimal weak mass transport.
Salle de Conférences
le 16 septembre 2021 à 11:00
We introduce weak barycenters of a family of probability distributions, based on the recently developed notion of optimal weak transport of mass. We provide a theoretical analysis of this object and discuss its interpretation in the light of convex ordering between probability measures. In particular, we show that, rather than averaging in a geometric way the input distributions, as the Wasserstein barycenter based on classic optimal transport does, weak barycenters extract common geometric information shared by all the input distributions, encoded as a latent random variable that underlies all of them. We also provide an iterative algorithm to compute a weak barycenter for a finite family of input distributions, and a stochastic algorithm that computes them for arbitrary populations of laws. The latter approach is particularly well suited for the streaming setting, i.e., when distributions are observed sequentially.