A Wasserstein-type Distance for Gaussian Mixtures on Vector Bundles with Applications to Shape Analysis

Abstract: This paper uses sample data to study the problem of comparing populations on finite-dimensional parallelizable Riemannian manifolds and more general trivial vector bundles. Utilizing triviality, our framework represents populations as mixtures of Gaussians on vector bundles and estimates the population parameters using a mode-based clustering algorithm. We derive a Wasserstein-type metric between Gaussian mixtures, adapted to the manifold geometry, in order to compare estimated distributions. Our contributions include an identifiability result for Gaussian mixtures on manifold domains and a convenient characterization of optimal couplings of Gaussian mixtures under the derived metric. We demonstrate these tools on some example domains, including the pre-shape space of planar closed curves, with applications to the shape space of triangles and populations of nanoparticles. In the nanoparticle application, we consider a sequence of populations of particle shapes arising from a manufacturing process, and utilize the Wasserstein-type distance to perform change-point detection.