Characterization of Correlation in Stochastic Computing Functions

Stochastic computing (SC) is an alternative computing paradigm that provides low-cost hardware implementation for complex operations. Many previous works adopted SC in several applications such as signal processing and pattern recognition, where these types of application possess a nature of successive computations. Successive SC computation affects correlation, which affects accuracy. This relationship is not studied well before. In this paper, we characterize correlation properties for SC functions to thoroughly understand the computation-correlation-accuracy relationship. We provide a measure ( δSCC) to identify the significance of variation of correlation due to computation. We also offer a general method to determine the correlation characteristics of any designed SC function.