We propose a novel approach for comparing distributions whose supports do not necessarily lie on the same metric space. Unlike Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance which compares pairwise distances of elements from each distribution, we consider a method allowing to embed the metric measure spaces in a common Euclidean space and compute an optimal transport (OT) on the embedded distributions. This leads to what we call a sub-embedding robust Wasserstein (SERW) distance. Under some conditions, SERW is a distance that considers an OT distance of the (low-distorted) embedded distributions using a common metric. In addition to this novel proposal that generalizes several recent OT works, our contributions stand on several theoretical analyses: (i) we characterize the embedding spaces to define SERW distance for distribution alignment; (ii) we prove that SERW mimics almost the same properties of GW distance, and we give a cost relation between GW and SERW. The paper also provides some numerical illustrations of how SERW behaves on matching problems.

Optimal transport has recently been reintroduced to the machine learning community thanks in part to novel efficient optimization procedures allowing for medium to large scale applications. We propose a Python toolbox that implements several key optimal transport ideas for the machine learning community. The toolbox contains implementations of a number of founding works of OT for machine learning such as Sinkhorn algorithm and Wasserstein barycenters, but also provides generic solvers that can be used for conducting novel fundamental research. This toolbox, named POT for Python Optimal Transport, is open source with an MIT license.

Classical optimal transport problem seeks a transportation map that preserves the total mass between two probability distributions, requiring their masses to be equal. This may be too restrictive in some applications such as color or shape matching, since the distributions may have arbitrary masses and/or only a fraction of the total mass has to be transported. In this paper, we address the partial Wasserstein and Gromov-Wasserstein problems and propose exact algorithms to solve them. We showcase the new formulation in a positive-unlabeled (PU) learning application. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of optimal transport in this context and we first highlight that partial Wasserstein-based metrics prove effective in usual PU learning settings. We then demonstrate that partial Gromov-Wasserstein metrics are efficient in scenarii in which the samples from the positive and the unlabeled datasets come from different domains or have different features.

We introduce in this paper a novel strategy for efficiently approximating the Sinkhorn distance between two discrete measures. After identifying neglectable components of the dual solution of the regularized Sinkhorn problem, we propose to screen those components by directly setting them at that value before entering the Sinkhorn problem. This allows us to solve a smaller Sinkhorn problem while ensuring approximation with provable guarantees. More formally, the approach is based on a new formulation of dual of Sinkhorn divergence problem and on the KKT optimality conditions of this problem, which enable identification of dual components to be screened. This new analysis leads to the Screenkhorn algorithm. We illustrate the efficiency of Screenkhorn on complex tasks such as dimensionality reduction and domain adaptation involving regularized optimal transport.

This paper deals with the problem of large-scale linear supervised learning in settings where a large number of continuous features are available. We propose to combine the well-known trick of one-hot encoding of continuous features with a new penalization called binarsity. In each group of binary features coming from the one-hot encoding of a single raw continuous feature, this penalization uses total-variation regularization together with an extra linear constraint. This induces two interesting properties on the model weights of the one-hot encoded features: they are piecewise constant, and are eventually block sparse. Non-asymptotic oracle inequalities for generalized linear models are proposed. Moreover, under a sparse additive model assumption, we prove that our procedure matches the state-of-the-art in this setting. Numerical experiments illustrate the good performances of our approach on several datasets. It is also noteworthy that our method has a numerical complexity comparable to standard $\ell_1$ penalization.

Matrix completion aims to reconstruct a data matrix based on observations of a small number of its entries. Usually in matrix completion a single matrix is considered, which can be, for example, a rating matrix in recommendation system. However, in practical situations, data is often obtained from multiple sources which results in a collection of matrices rather than a single one. In this work, we consider the problem of collective matrix completion with multiple and heterogeneous matrices, which can be count, binary, continuous, etc. We first investigate the setting where, for each source, the matrix entries are sampled from an exponential family distribution. Then, we relax the assumption of exponential family distribution for the noise. In this setting, we do not assume any specific model for the observations. The estimation procedures are based on minimizing the sum of a goodness-of-fit term and the nuclear norm penalization of the whole collective matrix. We prove that the proposed estimators achieve fast rates of convergence under the two considered settings and we corroborate our results with numerical experiments.

We consider the problem of learning the inhomogeneous intensity of a counting process, under a sparse segmentation assumption. We introduce a weighted total-variation penalization, using data-driven weights that correctly scale the penalization along the observation interval. We prove that this leads to a sharp tuning of the convex relaxation of the segmentation prior, by stating oracle inequalities with fast rates of convergence, and consistency for change-points detection. This provides first theoretical guarantees for segmentation with a convex proxy beyond the standard independent identically distributed signal + white noise setting. We introduce a fast algorithm to solve this convex problem. Numerical experiments illustrate our approach on simulated and on a high-frequency genomics data set.