Coarse extrinsic curvature of Riemannian submanifolds

Abstract

We introduce a novel concept of coarse extrinsic curvature for Riemannian submanifolds, inspired by Ollivier's notion of coarse Ricci curvature. This curvature is derived from the Wasserstein 1-distance between probability measures supported in the tubular neighborhood of a submanifold, providing new insights into the extrinsic curvature of isometrically embedded manifolds in Euclidean spaces. The framework also offers a method to approximate the mean curvature from statistical data, such as point clouds generated by a Poisson point process. This approach has potential applications in manifold learning and the study of metric embeddings, enabling the inference of geometric information from empirical data.