Is SP BP?

  • Authors:
  • Ronghui Tu;Yongyi Mao;Jiying Zhao

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada;School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada;School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The survey propagation (SP) algorithm for solving k-SAT problems has been shown recently as an instance of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm. In this paper, we show that for general constraint-satisfaction problems, SP may not be reducible from BP. We also establish the conditions under which such a reduction is possible. Along our development, we present a unification of the existing SP algorithms in terms of a probabilistically interpretable iterative procedure -- weighted probabilistic token passing.