@inproceedings{117c949588644af2afa2cf6b97c395ca,
title = "Smoothed analysis of belief propagation for minimum-cost flow and matching",
abstract = "Belief propagation (BP) is a message-passing heuristic for statistical inference in graphical models such as Bayesian networks and Markov random fields. BP is used to compute marginal distributions or maximum likelihood assignments and has applications in many areas, including machine learning, image processing, and computer vision. However, the theoretical understanding of the performance of BP is unsatisfactory. Recently, BP has been applied to combinatorial optimization problems. It has been proved that BP can be used to compute maximum-weight matchings and minimum-cost flows for instances with a unique optimum. The number of iterations needed for this is pseudo-polynomial and hence BP is not efficient in general. We study belief propagation in the framework of smoothed analysis and prove that with high probability the number of iterations needed to compute maximum-weight matchings and minimum-cost flows is bounded by a polynomial if the weights/costs of the edges are randomly perturbed. To prove our upper bounds, we use an isolation lemma by Beier and V{\"o}cking (SIAM J. Comput., 2006) for matching and generalize an isolation lemma for min-cost flow by Gamarnik, Shah, and Wei (Oper. Res., 2012). We also prove almost matching lower tail bounds for the number of iterations that BP needs to converge.",
keywords = "EWI-22420, Message-passing algorithms, Smoothed Analysis, IR-83740, METIS-296431, Belief propagation, Min-cost flow, Combinatorial optimization, Matching",
author = "Tobias Brunsch and Kamiel Cornelissen and Bodo Manthey and Heiko R{\"o}glin",
note = "10.1007/978-3-642-36065-7_18 ; 7th International Workshop on Algorithms and Computation, WALCOM 2013 ; Conference date: 14-02-2013 Through 16-02-2013",
year = "2013",
doi = "10.1007/978-3-642-36065-7_18",
language = "Undefined",
isbn = "978-3-642-36064-0",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
publisher = "Springer",
pages = "182--193",
editor = "{Kumar Ghosh}, S. and T. Tokuyama",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Algorithms and Computation (WALCOM 2013)",
address = "Germany",
}