Total variation distance of probability measures

In probability theory, the total variation distance is a distance measure for probability distributions. It is an example of a statistical distance metric, and is sometimes called the statistical distance or variational distance.

Definition

The total variation distance between two probability measures P and Q on a sigma-algebra ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}}$ of subsets of the sample space ${\displaystyle \Omega }$ is defined via[1]

${\displaystyle \delta (P,Q)=\sup _{A\in {\mathcal {F}}}\left|P(A)-Q(A)\right|.}$

Informally, this is the largest possible difference between the probabilities that the two probability distributions can assign to the same event.

Properties

Relation to other distances

The total variation distance is related to the Kullback–Leibler divergence by Pinsker's inequality:

${\displaystyle \delta (P,Q)\leq {\sqrt {{\frac {1}{2}}D_{\mathrm {KL} }(P\parallel Q)}}.}$

When the set is countable, the total variation distance is related to the L1 norm by the identity:[2]

${\displaystyle \delta (P,Q)={\frac {1}{2}}\|P-Q\|_{1}={\frac {1}{2}}\sum _{\omega \in \Omega }|P(\omega )-Q(\omega )|.}$

Connection to transportation theory

The total variation distance (or half the norm) arises as the optimal transportation cost, when the cost function is ${\displaystyle c(x,y)={\mathbf {1} }_{x\neq y}}$, that is,

${\displaystyle {\frac {1}{2}}\|P-Q\|_{1}=\delta (P,Q)=\inf _{\pi }\operatorname {E} _{\pi }[{\mathbf {1} }_{x\neq y}],}$

where the expectation is taken with respect to the probability measure ${\displaystyle \pi }$ on the space where ${\displaystyle (x,y)}$ lives, and the infimum is taken over all such ${\displaystyle \pi }$ with marginals ${\displaystyle P}$ and ${\displaystyle Q}$, respectively[3].