The Kantorovich Metric in Computer Science: A Brief Survey

Abstract

In contrast to its wealth of applications in mathematics, the Kantorovich metric started to be noticed in computer science only in recent years. We give a brief survey of its applications in probabilistic concurrency, image retrieval, data mining, and bioinformatics. This paper highlights the usefulness of the Kantorovich metric as a general mathematical tool for solving various kinds of problems in rather unrelated domains.