Tropical optimal transport and Wasserstein distances (Q2154662)

Optimal transport concerns minimal couplings of probability distributions over a metric space \((\mathcal{X}, d)\). Different metrics on the same space will lead to different optimal couplings. This paper lays down the basics of classical transport theory for the tropical projective torus \(\mathbb{R}^d / \mathbb{R} (1, \dots, 1)\), endowed with the tropical metric \[ d_{tr}(x,y) = \max_i (x_i-y_i) - \min_i (x_i-y_i). \] The paper is an introductory text, helpful to facilitate further research at the intersection of these two fields (tropical geometry and optimal transport). For concrete applications, the tropical projective torus turns up naturally in phylogenetics and auctions theory. Some explanatory texts on these connections are the following. [\textit{A. Monod} et al., ``Tropical geometry of phylogenetic tree space: a statistical perspective'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1805.12400}; \textit{R. A. Crowell} and \textit{N. M. Tran}, ``Tropical geometry and mechanism design'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1606.04880}; \textit{M. Joswig}, Essentials of tropical combinatorics. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2021; Zbl 07517377)]. In [\textit{A. Monod} et al., ``Tropical geometry of phylogenetic tree space: a statistical perspective'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1805.12400}], each point in the tropical projective torus encodes all pairwise distances between leaves of a phylogenetics tree. The tropical metric thus measures distances between trees. In [\textit{R. A. Crowell} and \textit{N. M. Tran}, ``Tropical geometry and mechanism design'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1606.04880}], each point in the tropical projective torus encodes a price vector. The paper [\textit{R. A. Crowell} and \textit{N. M. Tran}, ``Tropical geometry and mechanism design'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1606.04880}] makes clear the connection between mechanism design and tropical geometry. Connections between mechanism design and optimal transport is a large research field. Here are two entry references. [\textit{C. Daskalakis} et al., ``Mechanism design via optimal transport'', in: Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce, EC'13. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 269--286 (2013; \url{doi:10.1145/2492002.2482593}); \textit{A. Galichon}, Optimal transport methods in economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2018)]. Textbook [\textit{M. Joswig}, Essentials of tropical combinatorics. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2021; Zbl 07517377)] is a general reference on the tropical projective torus and questions of interest to the combinatorics of tropical polytopes and hyperplane arrangements that arise.