Barycenters in the Hellinger-Kantorovich space

Abstract

Recently, Liero, Mielke and Savaré introduced Hellinger-Kantorovich distance on the space of nonnegative Radon measures of a metric space $X$ [19,20]. We prove that Hellinger-Kantorovich barycenters always exist for a class of metric spaces containing of compact spaces, and Polish $CAT(1)$ spaces; and if we assume further some conditions on starting measures, such barycenters are unique. We also introduce homogeneous multimarginal problems and illustrate some relations between their solutions with Hellinger-Kantorovich barycenters. Our results are analogous to the work of Agueh and Carlier [1] for Wassertein barycenters.

27 pages. Minor changes. To appear in Applied Mathematics and Optimization