Decentralized Computation of Wasserstein Barycenter over Time-Varying Networks

Abstract

Inspired by recent advances in distributed algorithms for approximating Wasserstein barycenters, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for this problem. The main novelty is that we consider time-varying computational networks, which are motivated by examples when only a subset of sensors can make an observation at each time step, and yet, the goal is to average signals (e.g., satellite pictures of some area) by approximating their barycenter. We prove non-asymptotic accelerated in the sense of Nesterov convergence rates and explicitly characterize their dependence on the parameters of the network and its dynamics. Our approach is based on our novel distributed non-smooth optimization method on time-varying networks, which may be of separate interest. In the experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.