Message Errors in Belief Propagation

Belief propagation (BP) is an increasingly popular method of performing approximate inference on arbitrary graphical models. At times, even further approximations are required, whether from quantization or other simplified message representations or from stochastic approximation methods. Introducing such errors into the BP message computations has the potential to adversely affect the solution obtained. We analyze this effect with respect to a particular measure of message error, and show bounds on the accumulation of errors in the system. This leads both to convergence conditions and error bounds in traditional and approximate BP message passing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: Alexander T. Ihler, John W. Fisher III, Alan S. Willsky
• Keywords: Approximate Bp Message, BP Message, BP Message Computations, NIPS 2004, NIPS 2007