Convergence of Empirical Optimal Transport in Unbounded Settings

Abstract

In compact settings, the convergence rate of the empirical optimal transport cost to its population value is well understood for a wide class of spaces and cost functions. In unbounded settings, however, hitherto available results require strong assumptions on the ground costs and the concentration of the involved measures. In this work, we pursue a decomposition-based approach to generalize the convergence rates found in compact spaces to unbounded settings under generic moment assumptions that are sharp up to an arbitrarily small $\epsilon > 0$. Hallmark properties of empirical optimal transport on compact spaces, like the recently established adaptation to lower complexity, are shown to carry over to the unbounded case.