Papers › Wasserstein medians: robustness, PDE characterization and numerics

Wasserstein medians: robustness, PDE characterization and numerics

4 Jul 2023arXiv:2307.01765links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Guillaume Carlier, Enis Chenchene, Katharina Eichinger

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We investigate the notion of Wasserstein median as an alternative to the Wasserstein barycenter, which has become popular but may be sensitive to outliers. In terms of robustness to corrupted data, we indeed show that Wasserstein medians have a breakdown point of approximately 1/2. We give explicit constructions of Wasserstein medians in dimension one which enable us to obtain Lᵖ estimates (which do not hold in higher dimensions). We also address dual and multimarginal reformulations. In convex subsets of ℝᵈ, we connect Wasserstein medians to a minimal (multi) flow problem \`a la Beckmann and a system of PDEs of Monge-Kantorovich-type, for which we propose a p-Laplacian approximation. Our analysis eventually leads to a new numerical method to compute Wasserstein medians, which is based on a Douglas-Rachford scheme applied to the minimal flow formulation of the problem.

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