Mayer control problem with probabilistic uncertainty on initial positions

Let μ∈ P2(Rd), where P2(Rd) denotes the space of square integrable probability measures, and consider a Borel-measurable function Φ:P2(Rd)→R. In this paper we develop an antithetic Monte Carlo estimator (A-MLMC) for Φ(μ), which achieves sharp error bound under mild regularity assumptions. The estimator takes as input the empirical laws μN=1N∑ i=1NδX i, where (a) (Xi)i=1N is a sequence of i.i.d. samples from μ or (b) (Xi)i=1N is a system of interacting particles (diffusions) corresponding to a McKean–Vlasov stochastic differential equation (McKV-SDE). Each case requires a separate analysis. For a mean-field particle system, we also consider the empirical law induced by its Euler discretisation which gives a fully implementable algorithm. As by-products of our analysis, we establish a dimension-independent rate of uniform strong propagation of chaos, as well as an L2 estimate of the antithetic difference for i.i.d. random variables corresponding to general functionals defined on the space of probability measures.

In this short communication we prove that the subspace Pn,n−1(X)of all probability measures P(X), whose supports consist of exactly n points is an (n−1)-dimensional topological manifold. A number of subspaces of the space of all probability measures having infinite dimension in the sense of dim, which are manifolds, are identified. We also consider individual subsets of the infinite compact set X, on which the space of probability measures is homotopy dense in the entire space. Three theorems on the topological properties of manifolds—subspaces of homotopy dense probability measures in the space of probability measures with finite supports on a compactum—are formulated and proven, and special cases of finite and infinite compactums are considered.

The existence of an inverse limit of an inverse system of (probability) measure spaces has been investigated since the very beginning of the modern probability theory. Results from Kolmogorov [11], Bochner [2], Choksi [6], Metivier [15], Bourbaki [4], Mallory and Sion [12] among others have paved the way of the deep understanding of this problem. All the above results, however, call for some topological concepts, or at least the ones which are closely related topological ones. In this paper we investigate purely measurable inverse systems of (probability) measure spaces, and give a sufficient condition for the existence of a unique inverse limit. An example for the considered purely measurable inverse systems of (probability) measure spaces is also given.

We introduce a new paradigm, `measure synchronization', for synchronizing graphs with measure-valued edges. We formulate this problem as maximization of the cycle-consistency in the space of probability measures over relative rotations. In particular, we aim at estimating marginal distributions of absolute orientations by synchronizing the `conditional' ones, which are defined on the Riemannian manifold of quaternions. Such graph optimization on distributions-on-manifolds enables a natural treatment of multimodal hypotheses, ambiguities and uncertainties arising in many computer vision applications such as SLAM, SfM, and object pose estimation. We first formally define the problem as a generalization of the classical rotation graph synchronization, where in our case the vertices denote probability measures over rotations. We then measure the quality of the synchronization by using Sinkhorn divergences, which reduces to other popular metrics such as Wasserstein distance or the maximum mean discrepancy as limit cases. We propose a nonparametric Riemannian particle optimization approach to solve the problem. Even though the problem is non-convex, by drawing a connection to the recently proposed sparse optimization methods, we show that the proposed algorithm converges to the global optimum in a special case of the problem under certain conditions. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments show the validity of our approach and we bring in new perspectives to the study of synchronization.

A definition of Lévy processes with values in the space of probability measures was introduced by Shiga and Tanaka (Electronic J. Prob. 11 (2006)). It is shown that the Lévy process with values in the space of probability measures in law has a modification satisfying a certain condition. The modification is a Lévy process in the sense of Shiga and Tanaka. The Lévy-Itô decomposition of sample paths of the Lévy process satisfying the condition is derived.

A Mayer optimal control problem on Wasserstein spaces over Riemannian manifolds

We derive a framework to compute optimal controls for problems with states in the space of probability measures. Since many optimal control problems constrained by a system of ordinary differential...

We investigate a mean field optimal control problem obtained in the limit of the optimal control of large particle systems with forcing and terminal data which are not assumed to be convex. We prove that the value function, which is known to be Lipschitz continuous but not of class \(C^1\), in general, without convexity, is actually smooth in an open and dense subset of the space of times and probability measures. As a consequence, we prove a new quantitative propagation of chaos-type result for the optimal solutions of the particle system starting from this open and dense set.

This paper presents primal heuristics for the computation of Wasserstein Barycenters of a given set of discrete probability measures. The computation of a Wasserstein Barycenter is formulated as an optimization problem over the space of discrete probability measures. In practice, the barycenter is a discrete probability measure which minimizes the sum of the pairwise Wasserstein distances between the barycenter itself and each input measure. While this problem can be formulated using Linear Programming techniques, it remains a challenging problem due to the size of real-life instances. In this paper, we propose simple but efficient primal heuristics, which exploit the properties of the optimal plan obtained while computing the Wasserstein Distance between a pair of probability measures. In order to evaluate the proposed primal heuristics, we have performed extensive computational tests using random Gaussian distributions, the MNIST handwritten digit dataset, and the Fashion MNIST dataset introduced by Zalando. We also used Translated MNIST, a modification of MNIST which contains original images, rescaled randomly and translated into a larger image. We compare the barycenters computed by our heuristics with the exact solutions obtained with a commercial Linear Programming solver, and with a state-of-the-art algorithm based on Gaussian convolutions. Our results show that the proposed heuristics yield in very short run time and an average optimality gap significantly smaller than 1%.

In this paper we provide an extension of the Viability and Invariance Theorems in the Wasserstein metric space of probability measures with finite quadratic moments in ℝ d for controlled systems of which the dynamic is bounded and Lipschitz. Then we characterize the viability and invariance kernels as the largest viability (resp. invariance) domains. As application of our result we consider an optimal control problem of Mayer type with lower semicontinuous cost function for the same controlled system with uncertainty on the initial state modeled by a probability measure. Following Frankowska, we prove using the epigraphical viability approach that the value function is the unique lower semicontinuous proximal episolution of a suitable Hamilton Jacobi equation.

The aim of this paper is to address optimality of stochastic control strategies via dynamic programming subject to total variation distance ambiguity on the conditional distribution of the controlled process. We formulate the stochastic control problem using minimax theory, in which the control minimizes the payoff while the conditional distribution, from the total variation distance set, maximizes it. First, we investigate the maximization of a linear functional on the space of probability measures on abstract spaces, among those probability measures which are within a total variation distance from a nominal probability measure, and then we give the maximizing probability measure in closed form. Second, we utilize the solution of the maximization to solve minimax stochastic control with deterministic control strategies, under a Markovian and a non-Markovian assumption, on the conditional distributions of the controlled process. The results of this part include (1) minimax optimization subject to total va...

We present a self-contained and comprehensive study of the Fisher-Rao space of matrix-valued non-commutative probability measures, and of the related Hellinger space. Our non-commutative Fisher-Rao space is a natural generalization of the classical commutative Fisher-Rao space of probability measures and of the Bures-Wasserstein space of Hermitian positive-definite matrices. We introduce and justify a canonical entropy on the non-commutative Fisher-Rao space, which differs from the von Neumann entropy. We consequently derive the analogues of the heat flow, of the Fisher information, and of the dynamical Schrödinger problem. We show the \(\Gamma \)-convergence of the \(\varepsilon \)-Schrödinger problem towards the geodesic problem for the Fisher-Rao space, and, as a byproduct, the strict geodesic convexity of the entropy.

On the optimal rate for the convergence problem in mean field control

We introduce the method of Geodesic Principal Component Analysis (GPCA) on the space of probability measures on the line, with finite second moment, endowed with the Wasserstein metric. We discuss the advantages of this approach, over a standard functional PCA of probability densities in the Hilbert space of square-integrable functions. We establish the consistency of the method by showing that the empirical GPCA converges to its population counterpart, as the sample size tends to infinity. A key property in the study of GPCA is the isometry between the Wasserstein space and a closed convex subset of the space of square-integrable functions, with respect to an appropriate measure. Therefore, we consider the general problem of PCA in a closed convex subset of a separable Hilbert space, which serves as basis for the analysis of GPCA and also has interest in its own right. We provide illustrative examples on simple statistical models, to show the benefits of this approach for data analysis. The method is also applied to a real dataset of population pyramids.

Statistical learning theory is regarded as an appropriate theory to deal with learning problems on small samples, and it has now become a novel research interest of the machine learning field. However, the theory is based on real-valued random samples and established on probability measure space; it rarely deals with learning problems based on fuzzy random samples and established on Sugeno measure space. It is well known that fuzzy random samples and Sugeno measure space are interesting and important extensions of real-valued random samples and probability measure space, respectively. Therefore, the statistical learning theory based on fuzzy random samples in Sugeno measure space is further discussed in this paper. Firstly, based on definitions of the distribution function and the expected value of fuzzy random variables in Sugeno measure space, the Hoeffding inequality of fuzzy random variables is proved. Secondly, for the sake of completeness of the paper, the key theorem of learning theory based on fuzzy random samples in Sugeno measure space is introduced. Finally, the bounds on the rate of uniform convergence of a learning process based on fuzzy random samples in Sugeno measure space are constructed.