Sample complexity of unbalanced entropic OT
Optimal transport (OT) has become a central language for comparing probability measures, but exact balanced OT is often both too rigid for data with missing, created, or destroyed mass and subject to unfavorable high-dimensional sample complexity. Entropic regularization and unbalanced relaxations address these limitations in complementary ways. Entropy smooths the geometry, improves statistical behavior, and enables fast Sinkhorn-type algorithms, while unbalanced marginal penalties replace hard conservation constraints by divergence terms adapted to noisy empirical data. This paper studies the sample complexity of entropic unbalanced OT at the level of the optimal coupling, rather than only the scalar transport value. We develop a translation-invariant dual formulation, prove compactness and strong convexity properties for the intrinsic dual variables, and convert these geometric estimates into high-probability finite-sample bounds for empirical couplings. The results clarify why regularization is a practical necessity in machine learning applications: it softens the curse of dimensionality, reduces the number of samples needed for stable transport estimation, and keeps the resulting estimators compatible with scalable Sinkhorn-type solvers.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Entropic Gromov-Wasserstein between Gaussian Distributions
We study the entropic Gromov-Wasserstein and its unbalanced version between (unbalanced) Gaussian distributions with different dimensions. When the metric is the inner product, which we refer to as inner product Gromov-W…
FormUnbalanced Optimal Transport, from Theory to Numerics
Optimal Transport (OT) has recently emerged as a central tool in data sciences to compare in a geometrically faithful way point clouds and more generally probability distributions. The wide adoption of OT into existing d…
On Unbalanced Optimal Transport: An Analysis of Sinkhorn Algorithm
We provide a computational complexity analysis for the Sinkhorn algorithm that solves the entropic regularized Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) problem between two measures of possibly different masses with at most $n$…
Sinkhorn Divergences for Unbalanced Optimal Transport
Optimal transport induces the Earth Mover's (Wasserstein) distance between probability distributions, a geometric divergence that is relevant to a wide range of problems. Over the last decade, two relaxations of optimal …
Entropic Optimal Transport between Unbalanced Gaussian Measures has a Closed Form
Although optimal transport (OT) problems admit closed form solutions in a very few notable cases, e.g. in 1D or between Gaussians, these closed forms have proved extremely fecund for practitioners to define tools inspire…
Form