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Asymptotic properties of distributed social sampling algorithm

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Abstract

Social sampling is a novel randomized message passing protocol inspired by social communication for opinion formation in social networks. In a typical social sampling algorithm, each agent holds a sample from the empirical distribution of social opinions at initial time, and it collaborates with other agents in a distributed manner to estimate the initial empirical distribution by randomly sampling a message from current distribution estimate. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the theoretical properties of the distributed social sampling algorithm over random networks. First, we provide a framework based on stochastic approximation to study the asymptotic properties of the algorithm. Then, under mild conditions, we prove that the estimates of all agents converge to a common random distribution, which is composed of the initial empirical distribution and the accumulation of quantized error. Besides, by tuning algorithm parameters, we prove the strong consistency, namely, the distribution estimates of agents almost surely converge to the initial empirical distribution. Furthermore, the asymptotic normality of estimation error generated by distributed social sample algorithm is addressed. Finally, we provide a numerical simulation to validate the theoretical results of this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFB0901900) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61573345).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Key Laboratory of Systems and Control, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Qian Liu & Haitao Fang

  2. School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Qian Liu & Haitao Fang

  3. ACCESS Linnaeus Centre, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, SE-100 44, Sweden

    Xingkang He

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  1. Qian Liu
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  2. Xingkang He
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  3. Haitao Fang
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Correspondence to Xingkang He.

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Liu, Q., He, X. & Fang, H. Asymptotic properties of distributed social sampling algorithm. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 63, 112202 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9890-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9890-5

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