Wasserstein Metric

picture info	Wasserstein Metric In mathematics, the Wasserstein distance or Kantorovich– Rubinstein metric is a distance function defined between probability distributions on a given metric space M. It is named after Leonid Vaseršteĭn. Intuitively, if each distribution is viewed as a unit amount of earth (soil) piled on ''M'', the metric is the minimum "cost" of turning one pile into the other, which is assumed to be the amount of earth that needs to be moved times the mean distance it has to be moved. This problem was first formalised by Gaspard Monge in 1781. Because of this analogy, the metric is known in computer science as the earth mover's distance. The name "Wasserstein distance" was coined by R. L. Dobrushin in 1970, after learning of it in the work of Leonid Vaseršteĭn on Markov processes describing large systems of automata (Russian, 1969). However the metric was first defined by Leonid Kantorovich in ''The Mathematical Method of Production Planning and Organization'' (Russian original 1939 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
picture info	Mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline. Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them. These objects consist of either abstractions from nature orin modern mathematicsentities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. A ''proof'' consists of a succession of applications of deductive rules to already established results. These results include previously proved theorems, axioms, andin case of abstraction from naturesome basic properties that are considered true starting points of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
picture info	Moment (mathematics) In mathematics, the moments of a function are certain quantitative measures related to the shape of the function's graph. If the function represents mass density, then the zeroth moment is the total mass, the first moment (normalized by total mass) is the center of mass, and the second moment is the moment of inertia. If the function is a probability distribution, then the first moment is the expected value, the second central moment is the variance, the third standardized moment is the skewness, and the fourth standardized moment is the kurtosis. The mathematical concept is closely related to the concept of moment in physics. For a distribution of mass or probability on a bounded interval, the collection of all the moments (of all orders, from to ) uniquely determines the distribution (Hausdorff moment problem). The same is not true on unbounded intervals (Hamburger moment problem). In the mid-nineteenth century, Pafnuty Chebyshev became the first person to think systematic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
picture info	Expected Value In probability theory, the expected value (also called expectation, expectancy, mathematical expectation, mean, average, or first moment) is a generalization of the weighted average. Informally, the expected value is the arithmetic mean of a large number of independently selected outcomes of a random variable. The expected value of a random variable with a finite number of outcomes is a weighted average of all possible outcomes. In the case of a continuum of possible outcomes, the expectation is defined by integration. In the axiomatic foundation for probability provided by measure theory, the expectation is given by Lebesgue integration. The expected value of a random variable is often denoted by , , or , with also often stylized as or \mathbb. History The idea of the expected value originated in the middle of the 17th century from the study of the so-called problem of points, which seeks to divide the stakes ''in a fair way'' between two players, who have to end th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]