Streaming Sliced Optimal Transport

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Nguyen, Khai
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915996609019904
author Nguyen, Khai
author_facet Nguyen, Khai
contents Sliced optimal transport (SOT), or sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance, is widely recognized for its statistical and computational scalability. In this work, we further enhance computational scalability by proposing the first method for estimating SW from sample streams, called streaming sliced Wasserstein (Stream-SW). To define Stream-SW, we first introduce a streaming estimator of the one-dimensional Wasserstein distance (1DW). Since the 1DW has a closed-form expression, given by the integral of the absolute difference between the quantile functions of the compared distributions, we leverage quantile approximation techniques for sample streams to define a streaming 1DW estimator. By applying the streaming 1DW to all projections, we obtain Stream-SW. The key advantage of Stream-SW is its low memory complexity while providing theoretical guarantees on the approximation error. We demonstrate that Stream-SW achieves a more accurate approximation of SW than random subsampling, with lower memory consumption, when comparing Gaussian distributions and mixtures of Gaussians from streaming samples. Additionally, we conduct experiments on point cloud classification, point cloud gradient flows, and streaming change point detection to further highlight the favorable performance of the proposed Stream-SW.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06835
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Streaming Sliced Optimal Transport
Nguyen, Khai
Machine Learning
Computation
Methodology
Sliced optimal transport (SOT), or sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance, is widely recognized for its statistical and computational scalability. In this work, we further enhance computational scalability by proposing the first method for estimating SW from sample streams, called streaming sliced Wasserstein (Stream-SW). To define Stream-SW, we first introduce a streaming estimator of the one-dimensional Wasserstein distance (1DW). Since the 1DW has a closed-form expression, given by the integral of the absolute difference between the quantile functions of the compared distributions, we leverage quantile approximation techniques for sample streams to define a streaming 1DW estimator. By applying the streaming 1DW to all projections, we obtain Stream-SW. The key advantage of Stream-SW is its low memory complexity while providing theoretical guarantees on the approximation error. We demonstrate that Stream-SW achieves a more accurate approximation of SW than random subsampling, with lower memory consumption, when comparing Gaussian distributions and mixtures of Gaussians from streaming samples. Additionally, we conduct experiments on point cloud classification, point cloud gradient flows, and streaming change point detection to further highlight the favorable performance of the proposed Stream-SW.
title Streaming Sliced Optimal Transport
topic Machine Learning
Computation
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06835