conference paper
Distributed inference over regression and classification models
2013
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
We study the distributed inference task over regression and classification models where the likelihood function is strongly log-concave. We show that diffusion strategies allow the KL divergence between two likelihood functions to converge to zero at the rate 1/Ni on average and with high probability, where N is the number of nodes in the network and i is the number of iterations. We derive asymptotic expressions for the expected regularized KL divergence and show that the diffusion strategy can outperform both non-cooperative and conventional centralized strategies, since diffusion implementations can weigh a node's contribution in proportion to its noise level.