Barycenters in the Hellinger-Kantorovich space (Q2232777)

In this paper, the authors study barycenters in the Hellinger-Kantorovich space. Indeed, let \((X,d)\) be a metric space and \((\varrho,d_\varrho)\) be its Euclidean cone. Let \(p\geq2\) be an integer, \(\lambda_1,\lambda_2,\dots,\lambda_p\) be positive real numbers satisfying \(\sum_{i=1}^{p}\lambda_i=1\) and \(\mu_1,\mu_2,\dots,\mu_p\in \mathcal{M}(X).\) Consider the following Hellinger-Kantorovich barycenter problem \[ \inf_{\mu\in\mathcal{M}(X)}J(\mu) =\sum_{i=1}^{p}\lambda_i HK^2 (\mu,\mu_i), \tag{1}\] where \(HK^2(.,.)\) is the Hellinger-Kantorovich distance. The authors first show that barycenters in the Hellinger-Kantorovich space \(\mathcal{M}(X)\) always exist if the base space \(X\) is a Polish metric space having property \((BC)\) (see Definition 2 of Section 3 in paper). Secondly, to study the uniqueness of barycenters they introduce dual formulations of the Hellinger-Kantorovich barycenter problem (1). Finally, in Wasserstein spaces, a homogeneous multimarginal problem is proposed and studied. Also, the authors establish relations of their minimum solutions with Hellinger-Kantorovich barycenters whenever \(X\) is a Polish space having property \((BC).\)