A Sparse Smoothing Newton Method for Solving Discrete Optimal Transport Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hou, Di, Liang, Ling, Toh, Kim-Chuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Hou, Di
Liang, Ling
Toh, Kim-Chuan
author_facet Hou, Di
Liang, Ling
Toh, Kim-Chuan
contents The discrete optimal transport (OT) problem, which offers an effective computational tool for comparing two discrete probability distributions, has recently attracted much attention and played essential roles in many modern applications. This paper proposes to solve the discrete OT problem by applying a squared smoothing Newton method via the Huber smoothing function for solving the corresponding KKT system directly. The proposed algorithm admits appealing convergence properties and is able to take advantage of the solution sparsity to greatly reduce computational costs. Moreover, the algorithm can be extended to solve problems with similar structures including the Wasserstein barycenter (WB) problem with fixed supports. To verify the practical performance of the proposed method, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to solve a large set of discrete OT and WB benchmark problems. Our numerical results show that the proposed method is efficient compared to state-of-the-art linear programming (LP) solvers. Moreover, the proposed method consumes less memory than existing LP solvers, which demonstrates the potential usage of our algorithm for solving large-scale OT and WB problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_06448
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Sparse Smoothing Newton Method for Solving Discrete Optimal Transport Problems
Hou, Di
Liang, Ling
Toh, Kim-Chuan
Optimization and Control
90C05, 90C06, 90C25
The discrete optimal transport (OT) problem, which offers an effective computational tool for comparing two discrete probability distributions, has recently attracted much attention and played essential roles in many modern applications. This paper proposes to solve the discrete OT problem by applying a squared smoothing Newton method via the Huber smoothing function for solving the corresponding KKT system directly. The proposed algorithm admits appealing convergence properties and is able to take advantage of the solution sparsity to greatly reduce computational costs. Moreover, the algorithm can be extended to solve problems with similar structures including the Wasserstein barycenter (WB) problem with fixed supports. To verify the practical performance of the proposed method, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to solve a large set of discrete OT and WB benchmark problems. Our numerical results show that the proposed method is efficient compared to state-of-the-art linear programming (LP) solvers. Moreover, the proposed method consumes less memory than existing LP solvers, which demonstrates the potential usage of our algorithm for solving large-scale OT and WB problems.
title A Sparse Smoothing Newton Method for Solving Discrete Optimal Transport Problems
topic Optimization and Control
90C05, 90C06, 90C25
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06448