A Riemannian submersion-based approach to the Wasserstein barycenter of positive definite matrices

In this paper, we introduce a novel geometrization on the space of positive definite matrices, derived from the Riemannian submersion from the general linear group to the space of positive definite matrices, resulting in easier computation of its geometric structure. The related metric is found to be the same as a particular Wasserstein metric. Based on this metric, the Wasserstein barycenter problem is studied. To solve this problem, some schemes of the numerical computation based on gradient descent algorithms are proposed and compared. As an application, we test the k-means clustering of positive definite matrices with different choices of matrix mean.