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arXiv · 1910.14572

Barycenters for the Hellinger--Kantorovich distance over $\mathbb{R}^d$

Gero Friesecke·Daniel Matthes·Bernhard Schmitzer
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Abstract

We study the barycenter of the Hellinger--Kantorovich metric over non-negative measures on compact, convex subsets of $\mathbb{R}^d$. The article establishes existence, uniqueness (under suitable assumptions) and equivalence between a coupled-two-marginal and a multi-marginal formulation. We analyze the HK barycenter between Dirac measures in detail, and find that it differs substantially from the Wasserstein barycenter by exhibiting a local `clustering' behaviour, depending on the length scale of the input measures. In applications it makes sense to simultaneously consider all choices of this scale, leading to a 1-parameter family of barycenters. We demonstrate the usefulness of this family by analyzing point clouds sampled from a mixture of Gaussians and inferring the number and location of the underlying Gaussians.

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Gero Friesecke, Daniel Matthes, Bernhard Schmitzer. 2021-01-25. Barycenters for the Hellinger--Kantorovich distance over $\mathbb{R}^d$. https://doi.org/10.1137/20m1315555

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