arXiv:2504.14164stat.MLcs.LG2025-04被引 2

提出一种新型球面分布距离度量,可高效比较方向数据。

Learning over von Mises-Fisher Distributions via a Wasserstein-like Geometry

  • 基于最优传输思想设计球面几何感知距离,分解为角度与集中度差异。
  • 在高集中度下导出闭式解,计算效率高且保持球面结构。
  • 适用于高维方向数据压缩与可解释推断,如生物医学与视觉特征。

我们提出一种新颖的、几何感知的距离度量,用于单位超球面上的 von Mises-Fisher(vMF)分布族,该分布是方向数据的基本模型。尽管vMF广泛应用于涉及球面数据的概率学习任务,但其分布间的可解释比较工具仍有限,主要受限于归一化常数的不可计算性以及缺乏合适的几何度量。受最优传输理论启发,我们设计了一种类似Wasserstein的距离,将两个vMF分布的差异分解为两个可解释成分:反映均值方向角分离的测地线项,和量化集中参数差异的方差类项。推导基于高集中度下的高斯近似,获得可计算的闭式表达式,并保留内在球面几何结构。证明该距离具备良好理论性质,并在非退化vMF分布空间中诱导出潜在几何结构。作为主要应用,我们开发了vMF混合模型压缩的高效算法,在高维场景下实现结构保持的模型简化。在合成数据及真实高维嵌入(包括生物医学句子表示与深度视觉特征)上的实验表明,该几何度量能有效区分分布并支持可解释推断。本工作通过引入一种可计算、受传输启发的超球面几何距离,扩展了方向数据分析的统计工具箱。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We introduce a novel, geometry-aware distance metric for the family of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions, which are fundamental models for directional data on the unit hypersphere. Although the vMF distribution is widely employed in a variety of probabilistic learning tasks involving spherical data, principled tools for comparing vMF distributions remain limited, primarily due to the intractability of normalization constants and the absence of suitable geometric metrics. Motivated by the theory of optimal transport, we propose a Wasserstein-like distance that decomposes the discrepancy between two vMF distributions into two interpretable components: a geodesic term capturing the angular separation between mean directions, and a variance-like term quantifying differences in concentration parameters. The derivation leverages a Gaussian approximation in the high-concentration regime to yield a tractable, closed-form expression that respects the intrinsic spherical geometry. We show that the proposed distance exhibits desirable theoretical properties and induces a latent geometric structure on the space of non-degenerate vMF distributions. As a primary application, we develop the efficient algorithms for vMF mixture reduction, enabling structure-preserving compression of mixture models in high-dimensional settings. Empirical results on synthetic datasets and real-world high-dimensional embeddings, including biomedical sentence representations and deep visual features, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed geometry in distinguishing distributions and supporting interpretable inference. This work expands the statistical toolbox for directional data analysis by introducing a tractable, transport-inspired distance tailored to the geometry of the hypersphere.

方向数据球面几何概率模型最优传输

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