A Relaxed FPTAS for Chance-Constrained Knapsack

The stochastic knapsack problem is a stochastic version of the well known deterministic knapsack problem, in which some of the input values are random variables. There are several variants of the stochastic problem. In this paper we concentrate on the chance-constrained variant, where item values are deterministic and item sizes are stochastic. The goal is to find a maximum value allocation subject to the constraint that the overflow probability is at most a given value. Previous work showed a PTAS for the problem for various distributions (Poisson, Exponential, Bernoulli and Normal). Some strictly respect the constraint and some relax the constraint by a factor of (1+epsilon). All algorithms use Omega(n^{1/epsilon}) time. A very recent work showed a "almost FPTAS" algorithm for Bernoulli distributions with O(poly(n) * quasipoly(1/epsilon)) time. In this paper we present a FPTAS for normal distributions with a solution that satisfies the chance constraint in a relaxed sense. The normal distribution is particularly important, because by the Berry-Esseen theorem, an algorithm solving the normal distribution also solves, under mild conditions, arbitrary independent distributions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first (relaxed or non-relaxed) FPTAS for the problem. In fact, our algorithm runs in poly(n/epsilon) time. We achieve the FPTAS by a delicate combination of previous techniques plus a new alternative solution to the non-heavy elements that is based on a non-convex program with a simple structure and an O(n^2 log {n/epsilon}) running time. We believe this part is also interesting on its own right

Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization via Poisson Approximation

We study several stochastic combinatorial problems, including the expected utility maximization problem, the stochastic knapsack problem and the stochastic bin packing problem. A common technical challenge in these problems is to optimize some function of the sum of a set of random variables. The difficulty is mainly due to the fact that the probability distribution of the sum is the convolution of a set of distributions, which is not an easy objective function to work with. To tackle this difficulty, we introduce the Poisson approximation technique. The technique is based on the Poisson approximation theorem discovered by Le Cam, which enables us to approximate the distribution of the sum of a set of random variables using a compound Poisson distribution. We first study the expected utility maximization problem introduced recently [Li and Despande, FOCS11]. For monotone and Lipschitz utility functions, we obtain an additive PTAS if there is a multidimensional PTAS for the multi-objective version of the problem, strictly generalizing the previous result. For the stochastic bin packing problem (introduced in [Kleinberg, Rabani and Tardos, STOC97]), we show there is a polynomial time algorithm which uses at most the optimal number of bins, if we relax the size of each bin and the overflow probability by eps. For stochastic knapsack, we show a 1+eps-approximation using eps extra capacity, even when the size and reward of each item may be correlated and cancelations of items are allowed. This generalizes the previous work [Balghat, Goel and Khanna, SODA11] for the case without correlation and cancelation. Our algorithm is also simpler. We also present a factor 2+eps approximation algorithm for stochastic knapsack with cancelations. the current known approximation factor of 8 [Gupta, Krishnaswamy, Molinaro and Ravi, FOCS11].Comment: 42 pages, 1 figure, Preliminary version appears in the Proceeding of the 45th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC13

Maximizing Expected Utility for Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization Problems

We study the stochastic versions of a broad class of combinatorial problems where the weights of the elements in the input dataset are uncertain. The class of problems that we study includes shortest paths, minimum weight spanning trees, and minimum weight matchings, and other combinatorial problems like knapsack. We observe that the expected value is inadequate in capturing different types of {\em risk-averse} or {\em risk-prone} behaviors, and instead we consider a more general objective which is to maximize the {\em expected utility} of the solution for some given utility function, rather than the expected weight (expected weight becomes a special case). Under the assumption that there is a pseudopolynomial time algorithm for the {\em exact} version of the problem (This is true for the problems mentioned above), we can obtain the following approximation results for several important classes of utility functions: (1) If the utility function \uti is continuous, upper-bounded by a constant and \lim_{x\rightarrow+\infty}\uti(x)=0, we show that we can obtain a polynomial time approximation algorithm with an {\em additive error} $\epsilon$ for any constant $\epsilon>0$. (2) If the utility function \uti is a concave increasing function, we can obtain a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS). (3) If the utility function \uti is increasing and has a bounded derivative, we can obtain a polynomial time approximation scheme. Our results recover or generalize several prior results on stochastic shortest path, stochastic spanning tree, and stochastic knapsack. Our algorithm for utility maximization makes use of the separability of exponential utility and a technique to decompose a general utility function into exponential utility functions, which may be useful in other stochastic optimization problems.Comment: 31 pages, Preliminary version appears in the Proceeding of the 52nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2011), This version contains several new results ( results (2) and (3) in the abstract

Evolutionary algorithms for the chance-constrained knapsack problem

Evolutionary algorithms have been widely used for a range of stochastic optimization problems. In most studies, the goal is to optimize the expected quality of the solution. Motivated by real-world problems where constraint violations have extremely disruptive effects, we consider a variant of the knapsack problem where the profit is maximized under the constraint that the knapsack capacity bound is violated with a small probability of at most α. This problem is known as chance-constrained knapsack problem and chance-constrained optimization problems have so far gained little attention in the evolutionary computation literature. We show how to use popular deviation inequalities such as Chebyshev's inequality and Chernoff bounds as part of the solution evaluation when tackling these problems by evolutionary algorithms and compare the effectiveness of our algorithms on a wide range of chance-constrained knapsack instances.Xue Xie, Oscar Harper, Hirad Assimi, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neuman

Attention and Sensor Planning in Autonomous Robotic Visual Search

This thesis is concerned with the incorporation of saliency in visual search and the development of sensor planning strategies for visual search. The saliency model is a mixture of two schemes that extracts visual clues regarding the structure of the environment and object specific features. The sensor planning methods, namely Greedy Search with Constraint (GSC), Extended Greedy Search (EGS) and Dynamic Look Ahead Search (DLAS) are approximations to the optimal solution for the problem of object search, as extensions to the work of Yiming Ye. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed methods. They show that by using saliency in search a performance improvement up to 75% is attainable in terms of number of actions taken to complete the search. As for the planning strategies, the GSC algorithm achieved the highest detection rate and the best efficiency in terms of cost it incurs to explore every percentage of an environment

확률최대화 조합최적화 문제에 대한 근사해법

학위논문(석사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 산업공학과,2019. 8. 이경식.In this thesis, we consider a variant of the deterministic combinatorial optimization problem (DCO) where there is uncertainty in the data, the probability maximizing combinatorial optimization problem (PCO). PCO is the problem of maximizing the probability of satisfying the capacity constraint, while guaranteeing the total profit of the selected subset is at least a given value. PCO is closely related to the chance-constrained combinatorial optimization problem (CCO), which is of the form that the objective function and the constraint function of PCO is switched. It search for a subset that maximizes the total profit while guaranteeing the probability of satisfying the capacity constraint is at least a given threshold. Thus, we discuss the relation between the two problems and analyse the complexities of the problems in special cases. In addition, we generate pseudo polynomial time exact algorithms of PCO and CCO that use an exact algorithm of a deterministic constrained combinatorial optimization problem. Further, we propose an approximation scheme of PCO that is fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) in some special cases that are NP-hard. An approximation scheme of CCO is also presented which was derived in the process of generating the approximation scheme of PCO.본 논문에서는 일반적인 조합 최적화 문제(deterministic combinatorial optimization problem : DCO)에서 데이터의 불확실성이 존재할 때를 다루는 문제로, 총 수익을 주어진 상수 이상으로 보장하면서 용량 제약을 만족시킬 확률을 최대화하는 확률 최대화 조합 최적화 문제(probability maximizing combinatorial optimization problem : PCO)을 다룬다. PCO와 매우 밀접한 관계가 있는 문제로, 총 수익을 최대화하면서 용량 제약을 만족시킬 확률이 일정 값 이상이 되도록 보장하는 확률 제약 조합 최적화 문제(chance-constrained combinatorial optimization problem : CCO)가 있다. 우리는 두 문제의 관계에 대하여 논의하고 특정 조건 하에서 두 문제의 복잡도를 분석하였다. 또한, 제약식이 하나 추가된 DCO를 반복적으로 풀어 PCO와 CCO의 최적해를 구하는 유사 다항시간 알고리즘을 제안하였다. 더 나아가, PCO가 NP-hard인 특별한 인스턴스들에 대해서 완전 다항시간 근사해법(FPTAS)가 되는 근사해법을 제안하였다. 이 근사해법을 유도하는 과정에서 CCO의 근사해법 또한 고안하였다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Problem Description 1 1.2 Literature Review 7 1.3 Research Motivation and Contribution 12 1.4 Organization of the Thesis 13 Chapter 2 Computational Complexity of Probability Maximizing Combinatorial Optimization Problem 15 2.1 Complexity of General Case of PCO and CCO 18 2.2 Complexity of CCO in Special Cases 19 2.3 Complexity of PCO in Special Cases 27 Chapter 3 Exact Algorithms 33 3.1 Exact Algorithm of PCO 34 3.2 Exact Algorithm of CCO 38 Chapter 4 Approximation Scheme for Probability Maximizing Combinatorial Optimization Problem 43 4.1 Bisection Procedure of rho 46 4.2 Approximation Scheme of CCO 51 4.3 Variation of the Bisection Procedure of rho 64 4.4 Comparison to the Approximation Scheme of Nikolova 73 Chapter 5 Conclusion 77 5.1 Concluding Remarks 77 5.2 Future Works 79 Bibliography 81 국문초록 87Maste