Title :
Aggregate observational distinguishability is necessary and sufficient for social learning
Author :
Molavi, Pooya ; Jadbabaie, Ali
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Syst. Eng., Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Abstract :
We study a model of information aggregation and social learning recently proposed by Jadbabaie, Sandroni, and Tahbaz-Salehi, in which individual agents try to learn a correct state of the world by iteratively updating their beliefs using private observations and beliefs of their neighbors. No individual agent´s private signal might be informative enough to reveal the unknown state. As a result, agents share their beliefs with others in their social neighborhood to learn from each other. At every time step each agent receives a private signal, and computes a Bayesian posterior as an intermediate belief. The intermediate belief is then averaged with the beliefs of neighbors to form the individual´s belief at next time step. We find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions under which agents will learn the unknown state and reach consensus on their beliefs without any assumption on the private signal structure. The key enabler is a result that shows that using this update, agents will eventually forecast the indefinite future correctly.
Keywords :
belief networks; iterative methods; learning (artificial intelligence); multi-agent systems; Bayesian posterior; agent private signal; aggregate observational distinguishability; information aggregation model; intermediate belief; iterative belief update; neighbor belief; private observation; social learning model; social neighborhood; Bayesian methods; Computational modeling; Probability distribution; Silicon; Social network services; Vectors; Yttrium;
Conference_Titel :
Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC), 2011 50th IEEE Conference on
Conference_Location :
Orlando, FL
Print_ISBN :
978-1-61284-800-6
Electronic_ISBN :
0743-1546
DOI :
10.1109/CDC.2011.6161371