Local Second-Order Bounds for Aggregation-Order Variation in Density Fusion

Abstract

Distributed statistical analyses often aggregate local posterior or predictive densities by repeated pairwise fusion. When the binary fusion rule is nonassociative, changing the ordered aggregation tree can change the final density and the reported posterior summaries. We study this aggregation-order variation for smooth $f$-divergence balancing in a local density chart around a common reference density. Under square-root-transformed supplied weights and first-order nondegeneracy at each generated merge, every tree in a fixed finite family shares the same first-order coefficient, whereas the first probable tree-dependent term appears at second order. We derive the explicit second-order coefficient, propagate it through every tree in the family by a recursion for the tree-indexed second-order density coefficient, and show that a finite three-state posterior contrast detects the resulting discrepancy. The same coefficient determines density-level and quantity-of-interest diameters, rotation bounds, lower bounds, a limitation of scalar calibration, and a local corrected chart representation. The resulting expansions are uniform over each fixed finite tree family satisfying the stated local conditions.