Systems | Information | Learning | Optimization
 

The surprising reasonableness of the earth movers distance in high dimensions

The earth mover’s distance (EMD) is a scalar measure of dissimilarity between histograms.  Introduced over 200 years ago, the EMD has played a central role in linear programming, information retrieval, and is emerging as useful objective in machine learning.  During the 1990’s, the EMD was generalized from a functional that acts …