Channel equalization with perceptrons: an information-theoretic approach

We formulate the adaptive channel equalization as a conditional probability distribution learning problem. Conditional probability density function of the transmitted signal given the received signal is parametrized by a sigmoidal perceptron. In this framework, we use relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler distance) between the true and the estimated distributions as the cost function to be minimized. The true probabilities are approximated by their stochastic estimators resulting in a stochastic relative entropy cost function. This function is well-formed in the sense of Wittner and Denker (1988), therefore gradient descent on this cost function is guaranteed to find a solution. The consistency and asymptotic normality of this learning scheme are shown via maximum partial likelihood estimation of logistic models. As a practical example, we demonstrate that the resulting algorithm successfully equalizes multipath channels.<>