ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Lévy–Prokhorov metric

The lévy–prokhorov metric is a way to measure how different two probability distributions are. Imagine you and your friend both have a bag of different colored marbles, but you don't know what colors are in each other's bag. The lévy–prokhorov metric helps you figure out if your friend's bag has mostly the same colors as yours, or if they have a completely different set of colors.

When we talk about probability distributions, we mean how likely it is for different things to happen. For example, if you flip a coin, it's equally likely for it to land on heads or tails, so we say the probability of getting heads is 0.5 (or 50%).

The lévy–prokhorov metric compares two probability distributions by looking at how likely it is for things to happen in each one. It gives us a number that tells us how different the two distributions are. Think of it like a score – the higher the score, the more different the distributions are.

So, let's go back to the marbles. Imagine you have a bag with mostly red and blue marbles, and your friend has a bag with mostly green and yellow marbles. The lévy–prokhorov metric would give a high score because the two sets of colors are very different. But if your friend's bag had mostly red and blue marbles too, the score would be lower because the distributions are more similar.

Overall, the lévy–prokhorov metric is a way to compare how likely different things are to happen in two probability distributions. It helps us see if the distributions are similar or different, and gives us a score to describe the level of difference.