Inverse Optimal Transport

Abstract: Discrete optimal transportation problems arise in various contexts in engineering, the sciences and the social sciences. Examples include the marriage market in economics or international migration flows in demographics. Often the underlying cost criterion is unknown, or only partly known, and the observed optimal solutions are corrupted by noise. In this talk we discuss a systematic approach to infer unknown costs from noisy observations of optimal transportation plans. The proposed methodologies are developed within the Bayesian framework for inverse problems and require only the ability to solve the forward optimal transport problem, which is a linear program, and to generate random numbers. We illustrate our approach using the example of international migration flows. Here reported migration flow data captures (noisily) the number of individuals moving from one country to another in a given period of time. It can be interpreted as a noisy observation of an optimal transportation map, with costs related to the geographical position of countries. We use a graph-based formulation of the problem, with countries at the nodes of graphs and non-zero weighted adjacencies only on edges between countries which share a border. We use the proposed algorithm to estimate the weights, which represent cost of transition, and to quantify uncertainty in these weights.

analysis of PDEsfunctional analysisgeneral mathematicsnumerical analysisoptimization and controlprobabilitystatistics theory

Audience: researchers in the topic

One World seminar: Mathematical Methods for Arbitrary Data Sources (MADS)

Series comments: Description: Research seminar on mathematics for data

The lecture series will collect talks on mathematical disciplines related to all kind of data, ranging from statistics and machine learning to model-based approaches and inverse problems. Each pair of talks will address a specific direction, e.g., a NoMADS session related to nonlocal approaches or a DeepMADS session related to deep learning.

Approximately 15 minutes prior to the beginning of the lecture, a zoom link will be provided on the official website and via mailing list. For further details please visit our webpage.