IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2018 1835
Concise Derivation for Generalized Approximate
Message Passing Using Expectation Propagation
Qiuyun Zou , Haochuan Zhang , Chao-Kai Wen ,ShiJin , and Rong Yu
Abstract—Generalized approximate message passing (GAMP)
is an efficient algorithm for the estimation of independent identi-
cally distributed random signals under generalized linear model.
The sum-product GAMP has long been recognized as an approxi-
mate implementation of the sum-product loopy belief propagation.
In this letter, we propose to view the message passing in a new
perspective of expectation propagation (EP). Comparing with the
previous methods that were based on Taylor expansions, the pro-
posed EP method could unify the derivations for the real and the
complex GAMP, with a difference only in the setup of Gaussian
densities.
Index Terms—Generalized approximate message passing,
expectation propagation, Gaussian reproduction property.
I. INTRODUCTION
A
PPROXIMATE message passing (AMP) was proposed in
[1] to recover sparse signals from linear measurements
that were corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. Owing to
its efficiency (roughly of quadratic complexity in the problem
size) and effectiveness (asymptotically exact in certain cases),
AMP has since found various applications in engineering. Af-
ter AMP, an extension termed generalized AMP (GAMP) [2]
was developed, which considered a much broader scope, the
generalized linear model (GLM), allowing the componentwise
output mapping to take an arbitrary form. Motivated by GAMP,
the so-called BiGAMP was proposed by [3]. BiGAMP further
extended the linear inverse scope to bi-linear inverse, in which
both the input signal and the measurement matrix are to be
estimated. In these early works, signals were considered to be
Manuscript received September 8, 2018; accepted October 14, 2018. Date
of publication October 18, 2018; date of current version November 1, 2018.
The work of Q. Zou and H. Zhang was supported in part by the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61501127; in part
by the NSF of Guangdong under Grant 2016A030313705; and in part by the
Special Fund for Applied Science and Technology of Guangdong under Grant
2015B010129001, Grant 2014B090907010, and Grant 2015B010106010. The
work of C.-K. Wen was supported by the ITRI in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The work of
S. Jin was supported by the NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholars of China
under Grant 61625106. The work of R. Yu was supported by the NSFC under
Grant 61422201, Grant 61370159, and Grant 61503083. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was
Dr. Qing Ling. (Corresponding author: Haochuan Zhang.)
Q. Zou, H. Zhang, and R. Yu are with Guangdong University of Tech-
nology, Guangzhou 510006, China (e-mail:, qiuyunzou@qq.com; haochuan.
zhang@qq.com; yurong@ieee.org).
C.-K. Wen is with the National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung 80424,
Taiwan (e-mail:,chaokai.wen@mail.nsysu.edu.tw).
S. Jin is with Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail:, jin-
shi@seu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2018.2876806
real. However, for applications like wireless communications,
magnetic resonance imaging, and radar imaging, a complex
form would be more desired. In this context, complex AMP
and GAMP were proposed in [4]–[7] among others. Although
the sum-product AMP/GAMP has long been recognized as an
approximate implementation of the sum-product loopy belief
propagation (LBP), we find that, following this direction, the
derivation for the complex case may face some new challenges
in the expansion and justification of Taylor series.
In an attempt to recover complex GAMP without Taylor ex-
pansions, this letter offers a new perspective of viewing the
message passing as in an expectation propagation (EP) [8] man-
ner. To be specific, each variable and factor node in a factor
graph (FG) updates its message according to scalar EP rules.
The resulting messages are then in a Gaussian form, and after
certain approximation to the means and variances, the complex
sum-product GAMP could be recovered. It is worthy of noting
that the idea of using EP was introduced by [9]–[11] to derive
real and complex AMP. The method there, however, relied on a
key assumption of Gaussian likelihood, which prohibits a direct
extension to complex GAMP. To remove such a limitation, we
borrow an idea from [3], where a key step is to apply central
limit theorem in the Gaussian approximation of one part of the
message. We also note that there exists other ways to recover
the complex GAMP. For instance, GAMP can be treated as a
degenerate Gr-AMP [12], which admits also a concise deriva-
tion (but be aware their factor graph was different from ours as
they required additional nodes δ(·)). As another example, com-
plex GAMP could be approximated by expanding the complex
model into pairs of real variables, t hen applying the HyGAMP
[13] with (real, imaginary) pairs in the prior and likelihood,
leading to a GAMP-like algorithm that passes 2 × 2 covariance
matrices, and finally taking the SHyGAMP [14] approach to
approximate those covariance matrices by scaled identities.
Comparing with these methods, our derivation contributes
through the following aspects: first, offering a new perspective
to view the GAMP message passing in an EP manner; second,
extending prior work to establish a more general link that con-
nects EP and GAMP.
II. S
YSTEM MODEL AND GAMP RECAP
System Model: Consider the generalized linear model [2]
x →
H
z
→ p(y|z ) → y (1)
where the input x ∈ C
N
, randomly drawn from the distribu-
tion p(x)=
i
p(x
i
),islinearly mixed by a deterministic mea-
surement matrix H ∈ C
M ×N
to obtain z = Hx. Then z is
passed through a componentwise mapping channel whose transi-
tion probability function is p(y|z)=
M
a=1
p(y
a
|z
a
). The final
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