A Wasserstein-Type Distance for Gaussian Mixtures on Vector Bundles with Applications to Shape Analysis

This paper uses sample data to study the problem of comparing populations on finite-dimensional parallelizable Riemannian manifolds and more general trivial vector bundles. Utilizing triviality, our framework represents populations as mixtures of Gaussians on vector bundles and estimates the population parameters using a mode-based clustering algorithm. We derive a Wasserstein-type metric between Gaussian mixtures, adapted to the manifold geometry, in order to compare estimated distributions. Our contributions include an identifiability result for Gaussian mixtures on manifold domains and a convenient characterization of optimal couplings of Gaussian mixtures under the derived metric. We demonstrate these tools on some example domains, including the preshape space of planar closed curves, with applications to the shape space of triangles and populations of nanoparticles. In the nanoparticle application, we consider a sequence of populations of particle shapes arising from a manufacturing process and utilize the Wasserstein-type distance to perform change-point detection.