Gradient flows of energy functionals on the space of probability measures with Wasserstein metric has proved to be a strong tool in studying certain mass conserving evolution equations. Such gradient flows provide an alternate formulation for the solutions of the corresponding evolution equations. An important condition, which is known to guarantees existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence on initial data is that the corresponding energy functional be displacement convex. We introduce a relaxed notion of displacement convexity and we show that it still guarantees short time existence and uniqueness of Wasserstein gradient flows for higher order energy functionals which are not displacement convex in the standard sense. This extends the applicability of the gradient flow approach to larger family of energies. As an application, local and global well-posedness of different higher order non-linear evolution equations are derived. Examples include the thin-film equation and the quantum drift diffusion equation in one spatial variable.

Thesis (D.A.)--St. John's University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118 -122).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

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abstract: This thesis introduces new techniques for clustering distributional data according to their geometric similarities. This work builds upon the optimal transportation (OT) problem that seeks global minimum cost for matching distributional data and leverages the connection between OT and power diagrams to solve different clustering problems. The OT formulation is based on the variational principle to differentiate hard cluster assignments, which was missing in the literature. This thesis shows multiple techniques to regularize and generalize OT to cope with various tasks including clustering, aligning, and interpolating distributional data. It also discusses the connections of the new formulation to other OT and clustering formulations to better understand their gaps and the means to close them. Finally, this thesis demonstrates the advantages of the proposed OT techniques in solving machine learning problems and their downstream applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and image processing. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 2020

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This dissertation develops a comprehensive statistical learning framework that is robust to (distributional) perturbations in the data using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) under the Wasserstein metric. The learning problems that are studied include: (i) Distributionally Robust Linear Regression (DRLR), which estimates a robustified linear regression plane by minimizing the worst-case expected absolute loss over a probabilistic ambiguity set characterized by the Wasserstein metric; (ii) Groupwise Wasserstein Grouped LASSO (GWGL), which aims at inducing sparsity at a group level when there exists a predefined grouping structure for the predictors, through defining a specially structured Wasserstein metric for DRO; (iii) Optimal decision making using DRLR informed K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) estimation, which selects among a set of actions the optimal one through predicting the outcome under each action using K-NN with a distance metric weighted by the DRLR solution; and (iv) Distributionally Robust Multivariate Learning, which solves a DRO problem with a multi-dimensional response/label vector, as in Multivariate Linear Regression (MLR) and Multiclass Logistic Regression (MLG), generalizing the univariate response model addressed in DRLR. A tractable DRO relaxation for each problem is being derived, establishing a connection between robustness and regularization, and obtaining upper bounds on the prediction and estimation errors of the solution. The accuracy and robustness of the estimator is verified through a series of synthetic and real data experiments. The experiments with real data are all associated with various health informatics applications, an application area which motivated the work in this dissertation. In addition to estimation (regression and classification), this dissertation also considers outlier detection applications.

The present work is about measure-valued diffusion processes, which are aligned with two distinct geometries on the set of probability measures. In the first part we focus on a stochastic partial differential equation, the Dean-Kawasaki equation, which can be considered as a natural candidate for a Langevin equation on probability measures, when equipped with the Wasserstein distance. Apart from that, the dynamic in question appears frequently as a model for fluctuating density fields in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Yet, we prove that the Dean-Kawasaki equation admits a solution only in integer parameter regimes, in which case the solution is given by a particle system of finite size with mean field interaction. For the second part we restrict ourselves to positive probability measures on a finite set, which we identify with the open standard unit simplex. We show that Brownian motion on the simplex equipped with the Aitchison geometry, can be interpreted as a replicator dynamic in a white noise fitness landscape. We infer three approximation results for this Aitchison diffusion. Finally, invoking Fokker-Planck equations and Wasserstein contraction estimates, we study the long time behavior of the stochastic replicator equation, as an example of a non-gradient drift diffusion on the Aitchison simplex.