9,376 research outputs found
Prophet Secretary for Combinatorial Auctions and Matroids
The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of
Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these
models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The
most important of these generalizations are to matroids and to combinatorial
auctions (extends bipartite matching). Kleinberg-Weinberg \cite{KW-STOC12} and
Feldman et al. \cite{feldman2015combinatorial} show that for adversarial
arrival order of random variables the optimal prophet inequalities give a
-approximation. For many settings, however, it's conceivable that the
arrival order is chosen uniformly at random, akin to the secretary problem. For
such a random arrival model, we improve upon the -approximation and obtain
-approximation prophet inequalities for both matroids and
combinatorial auctions. This also gives improvements to the results of Yan
\cite{yan2011mechanism} and Esfandiari et al. \cite{esfandiari2015prophet} who
worked in the special cases where we can fully control the arrival order or
when there is only a single item.
Our techniques are threshold based. We convert our discrete problem into a
continuous setting and then give a generic template on how to dynamically
adjust these thresholds to lower bound the expected total welfare.Comment: Preliminary version appeared in SODA 2018. This version improves the
writeup on Fixed-Threshold algorithm
User-Base Station Association in HetSNets: Complexity and Efficient Algorithms
This work considers the problem of user association to small-cell base
stations (SBSs) in a heterogeneous and small-cell network (HetSNet). Two
optimization problems are investigated, which are maximizing the set of
associated users to the SBSs (the unweighted problem) and maximizing the set of
weighted associated users to the SBSs (the weighted problem), under
signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Both problems are
formulated as linear integer programs. The weighted problem is known to be
NP-hard and, in this paper, the unweighted problem is proved to be NP-hard as
well. Therefore, this paper develops two heuristic polynomial-time algorithms
to solve both problems. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithms
is evaluated and is shown to be far more efficient than the complexity of the
optimal brute-force (BF) algorithm. Moreover, the paper benchmarks the
performance of the proposed algorithms against the BF algorithm, the
branch-and-bound (B\&B) algorithm and standard algorithms, through numerical
simulations. The results demonstrate the close-to-optimal performance of the
proposed algorithms. They also show that the weighted problem can be solved to
provide solutions that are fair between users or to balance the load among
SBSs
Counting approximately-shortest paths in directed acyclic graphs
Given a directed acyclic graph with positive edge-weights, two vertices s and
t, and a threshold-weight L, we present a fully-polynomial time
approximation-scheme for the problem of counting the s-t paths of length at
most L. We extend the algorithm for the case of two (or more) instances of the
same problem. That is, given two graphs that have the same vertices and edges
and differ only in edge-weights, and given two threshold-weights L_1 and L_2,
we show how to approximately count the s-t paths that have length at most L_1
in the first graph and length at most L_2 in the second graph. We believe that
our algorithms should find application in counting approximate solutions of
related optimization problems, where finding an (optimum) solution can be
reduced to the computation of a shortest path in a purpose-built auxiliary
graph
Feature-Based Diversity Optimization for Problem Instance Classification
Understanding the behaviour of heuristic search methods is a challenge. This
even holds for simple local search methods such as 2-OPT for the Traveling
Salesperson problem. In this paper, we present a general framework that is able
to construct a diverse set of instances that are hard or easy for a given
search heuristic. Such a diverse set is obtained by using an evolutionary
algorithm for constructing hard or easy instances that are diverse with respect
to different features of the underlying problem. Examining the constructed
instance sets, we show that many combinations of two or three features give a
good classification of the TSP instances in terms of whether they are hard to
be solved by 2-OPT.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figure
Certified Algorithms: Worst-Case Analysis and Beyond
In this paper, we introduce the notion of a certified algorithm. Certified algorithms provide worst-case and beyond-worst-case performance guarantees. First, a ?-certified algorithm is also a ?-approximation algorithm - it finds a ?-approximation no matter what the input is. Second, it exactly solves ?-perturbation-resilient instances (?-perturbation-resilient instances model real-life instances). Additionally, certified algorithms have a number of other desirable properties: they solve both maximization and minimization versions of a problem (e.g. Max Cut and Min Uncut), solve weakly perturbation-resilient instances, and solve optimization problems with hard constraints.
In the paper, we define certified algorithms, describe their properties, present a framework for designing certified algorithms, provide examples of certified algorithms for Max Cut/Min Uncut, Minimum Multiway Cut, k-medians and k-means. We also present some negative results
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