Barycenters and a law of large numbers in Gromov hyperbolic spaces

Abstract

We investigate barycenters of probability measures on Gromov hyperbolic spaces, toward development of convex optimization in this class of metric spaces. We establish a contraction property (the Wasserstein distance between probability measures provides an upper bound of the distance between their barycenters), a deterministic approximation of barycenters of uniform distributions on finite points, and a kind of law of large numbers. These generalize the corresponding results on CAT(0)-spaces, up to additional terms depending on the hyperbolicity constant.