Convergence Analysis of the Variance in Gaussian Belief Propagation

It is known that Gaussian belief propagation (BP) is a low-complexity algorithm for (approximately) computing the marginal distribution of a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. 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 necessarily 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 computation 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.