Distributed Hypothesis Testing Research Articles

DECISION INTEGRATION FUNDAMENTALS IN DISTRIBUTED MANUFACTURING TOPOLOGIES

Advances in control, communications, computer science and engineering have made it possible to design and implement large scale systems, where the decision making, control and information processing are distributed. This research effort attempts to establish the theoretical foundation of operational decision integration for such systems. Decision integration is a method to improve the quality of decision making. The basic elements of the integration process are defined. A simple distributed hypothesis testing model is employed to demonstrate that properly designed integration always improves the quality of the decisions. The problem of organizing decision making agents into architectures of integration (parallel versus hierarchical) is addressed. Several elementary decision architectures for small organizations are analyzed, and their performance is compared. The results are also extended for the case of flexible architectures with adaptive topology. The implications of integration are discussed with resp...

Neural Nets and Implicit Inference

The contention that artificial neural nets operate by a process of distributed hypothesis testing is supported by analysis of the antiphon, a model which is close to standard associative-memory models but is intended primarily to represent memory storage under stochastic disturbance of the system. The memory capacity of the antiphon under "neuronal" inference rules has been evaluated elsewhere; here it is evaluated under the supposition of efficient inference procedures.