Non-local Wasserstein Geometry, Gradient Flows, and Functional Inequalities for Stationary Point Processes

Abstract: We construct a non-local Benamou-Brenier-type transport distance on the space of stationary point processes and analyse the induced geometry. We show that our metric is a specific variant of the transport distance recently constructed in [DSHS24]. As a consequence, we show that the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck semigroup is the gradient flow of the specific relative entropy w.r.t. the newly constructed distance. Furthermore, we show the existence of stationary geodesics, establish $1$-geodesic convexity of the specific relative entropy, and derive stationary analogues of functional inequalities such as a specific HWI inequality and a specific Talagrand inequality. One of the key technical contributions is the existence of solutions to the non-local continuity equation between arbitrary point processes.