Slow Convergence of Interacting Kalman Filters in Word-of-Mouth Social Learning
This addresses a theoretical bottleneck in social learning models, with implications for designing efficient information-sharing systems, though it is incremental as it builds on known Kalman filter frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of slow convergence in word-of-mouth social learning with multiple Kalman filter agents, showing that covariance decreases as k^{-(2^m-1)} for m agents, which is exponentially slower than the standard rate, and demonstrates that artificially weighing the prior can achieve the optimal k^{-1} rate.
We consider word-of-mouth social learning involving $m$ Kalman filter agents that operate sequentially. The first Kalman filter receives the raw observations, while each subsequent Kalman filter receives a noisy measurement of the conditional mean of the previous Kalman filter. The prior is updated by the $m$-th Kalman filter. When $m=2$, and the observations are noisy measurements of a Gaussian random variable, the covariance goes to zero as $k^{-1/3}$ for $k$ observations, instead of $O(k^{-1})$ in the standard Kalman filter. In this paper we prove that for $m$ agents, the covariance decreases to zero as $k^{-(2^m-1)}$, i.e, the learning slows down exponentially with the number of agents. We also show that by artificially weighing the prior at each time, the learning rate can be made optimal as $k^{-1}$. The implication is that in word-of-mouth social learning, artificially re-weighing the prior can yield the optimal learning rate.