Assume that we have a set of points in (dimension ).

Instead of assigning one

distribution to the set of points, we can cluster them and represent the point set in terms of

the clusters. Thus, each cluster is a single point in and the weight of the cluster is
decided by the fraction of the distribution present in that cluster. This representation of a
distribution by a set of clusters is called the signature. Two signatures can have different
sizes, for example, a bimodal distribution has shorter signature (2 clusters) than complex

ones. One cluster representation (mean or mode in ) can be thought of as a single

feature in a signature. The distance between each of the features is called as ground distance.
The Earth Mover's Distance can be formulated and solved as a transportation problem.
Suppose that several suppliers, each with a given amount of goods, are required to supply
several consumers, each with a given limited capacity. For each supplier-consumer pair, the
cost of transporting a single unit of goods is given. The transportation problem is then to
find a least-expensive flow of goods from the suppliers to the consumers that satisfies the

consumers' demand. Similarly, here the problem is transforming one signature( ) to

another( ) with minimum work done.