Assume that signature has clusters with , where is the cluster

representative and is the weight of the cluster. Similarly another

signature has clusters. Let be the ground distance between

clusters and .

We want to find a flow , with the flow between and , that minimizes the
overall cost.

subject to the constraints:

The optimal flow is found by solving this linear optimization problem. The earth
mover's distance is defined as the work normalized by the total flow:

Equivalent FormEdit
Equivalently, we can write:

where is the set of all joint distributions whose marginals are and .
Kantorovich-Rubinstein dualityEdit
By Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality, the following is an equivalent expression: