Question

What are generalized distributive law techniques?

Answer 1

GDL is a “general message passing algorithm”.  It is a “generalization of the distributive property”.  GDL has been formed by synthesizing the work of many authors in the field of “digital communications, information theory, artificial intelligence communities, signal processing and statistics.  It also includes many special cases of algorithm. This algorithm gives only approximate answers and only in some cases, it gives the exact answers.  For example, it is used in several optimization techniques such as “min-sum algorithm”, which is used to solve “probabilistic graphical models”