English

Distributed Convergence Verification for Gaussian Belief Propagation

Information Theory 2017-11-29 v1 math.IT

Abstract

Gaussian belief propagation (BP) is a computationally efficient method to approximate the marginal distribution and has been widely used for inference with high dimensional data as well as distributed estimation in large-scale networks. However, the convergence of Gaussian BP is still an open issue. Though sufficient convergence conditions have been studied in the literature, verifying these conditions requires gathering all the information over the whole network, which defeats the main advantage of distributed computing by using Gaussian BP. In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient convergence condition for Gaussian BP that applies to both the pairwise linear Gaussian model and to Gaussian Markov random fields. We show analytically that this sufficient convergence condition can be easily verified in a distributed way that satisfies the network topology constraint.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09888,
  title  = {Distributed Convergence Verification for Gaussian Belief Propagation},
  author = {Jian Du and Soummya Kar and José M. F. Moura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09888},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

accepted by Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, 2017, Asilomar, Pacific Grove, CA. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.04074

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:58:23.204Z