Probabilistic inference problems arise naturally in distributed systems such as sensor networks and teams of mobile robots. Inference algorithms that use message passing are a natural fit for distributed systems, but they must be robust to the failure situations that arise in real-world settings, such as unreliable communication and node failures. Unfortunately, the popular sum-product algorithm can yield very poor estimates in these settings because the nodes' beliefs before convergence can be arbitrarily different from the correct posteriors. In this paper, we present a new message passing algorithm for probabilistic inference which provides several crucial guarantees that the standard sum-product algorithm does not. Not only does it converge to the correct posteriors, but it is also guaranteed to yield a principled approximation at any point before convergence. In addition, the computational complexity of the message passing updates depends only upon the model, and is dependent of the network topology of the distributed system. We demonstrate the approach with detailed experimental results on a distributed sensor calibration task using data from an actual sensor network deployment.

本文研究了概率推断问题在分布式系统中的应用，提出了一种新的基于消息传递的算法，相较于传统的sum-product算法，该算法对节点故障和通信失效有更好的稳健性，且在网络拓扑复杂时具有更优的计算复杂度，并用传感器网络定标任务进行了实验验证。

分布式系统中的健壮概率推断