CEO problem for belief sharing

We consider the CEO problem for belief sharing. Multiple subordinates observe independently corrupted versions of uniformly distributed data and transmit coded versions over rate-limited links to a CEO who then estimates the underlying data. Agents are not allowed to convene before transmitting their observations. This formulation is motivated by the practical problem of a firm's CEO estimating uniformly distributed beliefs about a sequence of events, before acting on them. Agents' observations are modeled as jointly distributed with the underlying data through a given conditional probability density function. We study the asymptotic behavior of the minimum achievable mean squared error distortion at the CEO in the limit when the number of agents L and the sum rate R tend to infinity. We establish a 1/R2 convergence of the distortion, an intermediate regime of performance between the exponential behavior in discrete CEO problems [Berger, Zhang, and Viswanathan (1996)], and the 1/R behavior in Gaussian CEO problems [Viswanathan and Berger (1997)]. Achievability is proved by a layered architecture with scalar quantization, distributed entropy coding, and midrange estimation. The converse is proved using the Bayesian Chazan-Zakai-Ziv bound.