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  4. Computational and Statistical Properties of Optimal Transport-Based Distances

Computational and Statistical Properties of Optimal Transport-Based Distances

File(s)
Rioux_cornellgrad_0058F_15086.pdf (7.07 MB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://doi.org/10.7298/wesk-vd20
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/120780
Collections
Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Author
Rioux, Gabriel
Abstract

Over the past two decades, the statistical and computational properties of optimal transport (OT) have been systematically studied, driven in part by OT's broad applicability across data science, statistics, economics, physics, and other fields. This body of work has identified the curse of dimensionality inherent in statistical estimation with OT distances and has led the development of computationally and statistically efficient regularizations of OT. The first contribution of this thesis is a general framework for deriving limit distributions and other asymptotic properties of empirical regularized OT distances. While OT distances enable a natural comparison between distributions on a common space, comparing datasets of different types -- such as text and images -- requires specifying an ad hoc cost function, which may fail to capture a meaningful correspondence between data points. To address this issue, Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distances have been proposed, enabling a comparison of metric measure spaces based on their intrinsic structure. As a result, GW distances have found widespread use in applications involving heterogeneous data. The second contribution of this thesis is to establish the first limit laws for empirical GW distances and to derive consistent resampling schemes. Given the broad applicability of GW distances, their computation is of a particular interest. However, existing algorithms for computing regularized GW distances lack comprehensive convergence rate guarantees. To address this gap, the final contribution of this thesis is to introduce the first algorithms for computing regularized GW distances subject to formal non-asymptotic convergence rate guarantees.

Description
314 pages
Date Issued
2025-08
Keywords
Continuous optimization
•
Gromov-Wasserstein distances
•
Limit theorems
•
Nonsmooth analysis
•
Optimal transport
•
Regularization
Committee Chair
Goldfeld, Ziv
Committee Member
Kato, Kengo
Yang, Yunan
Degree Discipline
Applied Mathematics
Degree Name
Ph. D., Applied Mathematics
Degree Level
Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Type
dissertation or thesis

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