936 research outputs found

    Sufficient conditions for convergence of the Sum-Product Algorithm

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    We derive novel conditions that guarantee convergence of the Sum-Product algorithm (also known as Loopy Belief Propagation or simply Belief Propagation) to a unique fixed point, irrespective of the initial messages. The computational complexity of the conditions is polynomial in the number of variables. In contrast with previously existing conditions, our results are directly applicable to arbitrary factor graphs (with discrete variables) and are shown to be valid also in the case of factors containing zeros, under some additional conditions. We compare our bounds with existing ones, numerically and, if possible, analytically. For binary variables with pairwise interactions, we derive sufficient conditions that take into account local evidence (i.e., single variable factors) and the type of pair interactions (attractive or repulsive). It is shown empirically that this bound outperforms existing bounds.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Major changes and new results in this revised version. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

    Convergence Analysis of the Variance in Gaussian Belief Propagation

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    It is known that Gaussian belief propagation (BP) is a low-complexity algorithm for (approximately) computing the marginal distribution of a high dimensional Gaussian distribu- tion. However, in loopy factor graph, it is important to determine whether Gaussian BP converges. In general, the convergence conditions for Gaussian BP variances and means are not nec- essarily the same, and this paper focuses on the convergence condition of Gaussian BP variances. In particular, by describing the message-passing process of Gaussian BP as a set of updating functions, the necessary and sufficient convergence conditions of Gaussian BP variances are derived under both synchronous and asynchronous schedulings, with the converged variances proved to be independent of the initialization as long as it is chosen from the proposed set. The necessary and sufficient convergence condition is further expressed in the form of a semi-definite programming (SDP) optimization problem, thus can be verified more efficiently compared to the existing convergence condition based on compu- tation tree. The relationship between the proposed convergence condition and the existing one based on computation tree is also established analytically. Numerical examples are presented to corroborate the established theories.published_or_final_versio
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