Short communication: The Wasserstein distance as a dissimilarity metric for comparing detrital age spectra  and other geological distributions

Lipp, Alex; Vermeesch, Pieter

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-5-263-2023

Articles | Volume 5, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-5-263-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-5-263-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 5, issue 1

Short communication/technical note

|

17 May 2023

Short communication/technical note |

| 17 May 2023

Short communication: The Wasserstein distance as a dissimilarity metric for comparing detrital age spectra and other geological distributions

Alex Lipp and Pieter Vermeesch

Data sets

AlexLipp/detrital-wasserstein: Acceptance (1.0) Alex Lipp https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7937484

Short summary

We propose using the Wasserstein-2 distance (W₂) as an alternative to the widely used Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) statistic for analysing distributional data in geochronology. W₂ measures the horizontal distance between observations, while KS measures vertical differences in cumulative distributions. Using case studies, we find that W₂ is preferable in scenarios where the absolute age differences in observations provide important geological information. W₂ has been added to the R package IsoplotR.