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Breakdown properties of optimal transport maps: general transportation costs

Alberto Gonzalez-Sanz
Marco Avella Medina
Main:14 Pages
2 Figures
Bibliography:2 Pages
Abstract

Two recent works, Avella-Medina and González-Sanz (2026) and Passeggeri and Paindaveine (2026), studied the robustness of the optimal transport map through its breakdown point, i.e., the smallest fraction of contamination that can make the map take arbitrarily aberrant values. Their main finding is the following: let PP and QQ denote the target and reference measures, respectively, and let TT be the optimal transport map for the squared Euclidean cost. Then, the breakdown point of T(u)T(u), when PP is perturbed and QQ is fixed, coincides with the Tukey depth of uu relative to QQ. In this note, we extend this result to general convex cost functions, demonstrating that the cost function does not have any impact on the breakdown point of the optimal transport map. Our contribution provides a definitive characterization of the breakdown point of the optimal transport map. In particular, it shows that for a broad class of regular cost functions, all transport-based quantiles enjoy the same high breakdown point properties.

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