Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gartland, Chris, Ostrovskii, Mikhail, Rabani, Yuval, Young, Robert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19434
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918350255292416
author Gartland, Chris
Ostrovskii, Mikhail
Rabani, Yuval
Young, Robert
author_facet Gartland, Chris
Ostrovskii, Mikhail
Rabani, Yuval
Young, Robert
contents We prove that the distortion of any embedding into $L_1$ of the transportation cost space or earth mover distance over a $d$-dimensional grid $\{1,\dots m\}^d$ is $Ω(\log N)$, where $N$ is the number of vertices and the implicit constant is universal (in particular, independent of dimension). This lower bound matches the universal upper bound $O(\log N)$ holding for any $N$-point metric space. Our proof relies on a new Sobolev inequality for real-valued functions on the grid, based on random measures supported on dyadic cubes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle $L_1$-distortion of Earth Mover Distances and Transportation Cost Spaces on High Dimensional Grids
Gartland, Chris
Ostrovskii, Mikhail
Rabani, Yuval
Young, Robert
Functional Analysis
Computational Geometry
Metric Geometry
We prove that the distortion of any embedding into $L_1$ of the transportation cost space or earth mover distance over a $d$-dimensional grid $\{1,\dots m\}^d$ is $Ω(\log N)$, where $N$ is the number of vertices and the implicit constant is universal (in particular, independent of dimension). This lower bound matches the universal upper bound $O(\log N)$ holding for any $N$-point metric space. Our proof relies on a new Sobolev inequality for real-valued functions on the grid, based on random measures supported on dyadic cubes.
title $L_1$-distortion of Earth Mover Distances and Transportation Cost Spaces on High Dimensional Grids
topic Functional Analysis
Computational Geometry
Metric Geometry
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19434