Nearly sharp comparison results for sliced and max-sliced Wasserstein distances

Abstract

We prove new comparison results between the Wasserstein distance and its sliced and max-sliced counterparts. First, we show that the H\"older exponent~$\frac{2}{d+2}$ obtained by Bobkov and G\"otze for the max-sliced 1-Wasserstein distance on the unit ball is optimal for every $d \geq 2$, settling a question raised in their work. Second, we show that sharper comparisons are possible under stronger structural assumptions: if $\nu$ is a discrete measure and the optimal coupling between $\mu$ and $\nu$ transports each point to a nearest atom of $\nu$, then $W_p(\mu, \nu) \leq C \sqrt{d}\, K \, \mathrm{SW}_{p,1}(\mu, \nu)$ for a universal constant $C$, where the complexity parameter $K$ is always at most the number of atoms $N$ and can be substantially smaller. This complements a similar bound due to Park and Slep\v{c}ev. An analogous bound holds for the sliced Wasserstein distance based on $k$-dimensional projections. Finally, using a construction from geometric discrepancy theory due to Chen and Travaglini, we prove that the linear dependence on $K$ in this bound cannot be improved, up to polylogarithmic factors.