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arXiv · 1806.07348

Statistical Optimal Transport via Factored Couplings

Aden Forrow·Jan-Christian Hütter·Mor Nitzan·Philippe Rigollet·Geoffrey Schiebinger·Jonathan Weed
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Abstract

We propose a new method to estimate Wasserstein distances and optimal transport plans between two probability distributions from samples in high dimension. Unlike plug-in rules that simply replace the true distributions by their empirical counterparts, our method promotes couplings with low transport rank, a new structural assumption that is similar to the nonnegative rank of a matrix. Regularizing based on this assumption leads to drastic improvements on high-dimensional data for various tasks, including domain adaptation in single-cell RNA sequencing data. These findings are supported by a theoretical analysis that indicates that the transport rank is key in overcoming the curse of dimensionality inherent to data-driven optimal transport.

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Aden Forrow, Jan-Christian Hütter, Mor Nitzan, Philippe Rigollet, Geoffrey Schiebinger, Jonathan Weed. 2018-06-19. Statistical Optimal Transport via Factored Couplings. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07348

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