title: Statistical analysis of loopy belief propagation in random fields.
abstract: Loopy belief propagation (LBP), which is equivalent to the Bethe approximation in statistical mechanics, is a message-passing-type inference method that is widely used to analyze systems based on Markov random fields (MRFs). In this paper, we propose a message-passing-type method to analytically evaluate the quenched average of LBP in random fields by using the replica cluster variation method. The proposed analytical method is applicable to general pairwise MRFs with random fields whose distributions differ from each other and can give the quenched averages of the Bethe free energies over random fields, which are consistent with numerical results. The order of its computational cost is equivalent to that of standard LBP. In the latter part of this paper, we describe the application of the proposed method to Bayesian image restoration, in which we observed that our theoretical results are in good agreement with the numerical results for natural images.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamagata University, Japan. CREST, JST (Yamagata University).
authors.forename: Muneki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Yasuda
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan. CREST, JST (Tohoku University).
authors.forename: Shun
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kataoka
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan. CREST, JST (Tohoku University).
authors.forename: Kazuyuki
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tanaka