Authors
Arenas-Velilla S, Munk A, Rodríguez LA
Journal
Arxiv
Citation
arXiv:2604.12940
Abstract
Recently, the statistical properties of empirical Entropic Optimal Transport (EOT) have attracted great interest, as this quantity has been shown to be useful for complex data analysis, among other reasons due to its computational efficiency. In several applications, it has been observed that the EOT plan provides valuable information beyond just the optimal value. For example, in cell biology, colocalization analysis based on the EOT plan has been introduced as a measure for quantification of spatial proximity of different protein assemblies. Despite recent progress in the analysis of its risk properties, a precise understanding of its statistical fluctuations to make it accessible for inference remains elusive to a large extent. In this paper, we derive asymptotic weak convergence result for a large class of functionals of the EOT plan, in which the colocalization process is included. The proof is based on Hadamard differentiability and the extended delta method. As an application, we obtain uniform confidence bands for colocalization curves and bootstrap consistency. Our theory is supported by simulation studies and is illustrated by real world data analysis from mitochondrial protein colocalization.
