43,948 research outputs found
The Maximum Traveling Salesman Problem with Submodular Rewards
In this paper, we look at the problem of finding the tour of maximum reward
on an undirected graph where the reward is a submodular function, that has a
curvature of , of the edges in the tour. This problem is known to be
NP-hard. We analyze two simple algorithms for finding an approximate solution.
Both algorithms require oracle calls to the submodular function. The
approximation factors are shown to be and
, respectively; so the second
method has better bounds for low values of . We also look at how these
algorithms perform for a directed graph and investigate a method to consider
edge costs in addition to rewards. The problem has direct applications in
monitoring an environment using autonomous mobile sensors where the sensing
reward depends on the path taken. We provide simulation results to empirically
evaluate the performance of the algorithms.Comment: Extended version of ACC 2013 submission (including p-system greedy
bound with curvature
The Price of Information in Combinatorial Optimization
Consider a network design application where we wish to lay down a
minimum-cost spanning tree in a given graph; however, we only have stochastic
information about the edge costs. To learn the precise cost of any edge, we
have to conduct a study that incurs a price. Our goal is to find a spanning
tree while minimizing the disutility, which is the sum of the tree cost and the
total price that we spend on the studies. In a different application, each edge
gives a stochastic reward value. Our goal is to find a spanning tree while
maximizing the utility, which is the tree reward minus the prices that we pay.
Situations such as the above two often arise in practice where we wish to
find a good solution to an optimization problem, but we start with only some
partial knowledge about the parameters of the problem. The missing information
can be found only after paying a probing price, which we call the price of
information. What strategy should we adopt to optimize our expected
utility/disutility?
A classical example of the above setting is Weitzman's "Pandora's box"
problem where we are given probability distributions on values of
independent random variables. The goal is to choose a single variable with a
large value, but we can find the actual outcomes only after paying a price. Our
work is a generalization of this model to other combinatorial optimization
problems such as matching, set cover, facility location, and prize-collecting
Steiner tree. We give a technique that reduces such problems to their non-price
counterparts, and use it to design exact/approximation algorithms to optimize
our utility/disutility. Our techniques extend to situations where there are
additional constraints on what parameters can be probed or when we can
simultaneously probe a subset of the parameters.Comment: SODA 201
How to Influence People with Partial Incentives
We study the power of fractional allocations of resources to maximize
influence in a network. This work extends in a natural way the well-studied
model by Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos (2003), where a designer selects a
(small) seed set of nodes in a social network to influence directly, this
influence cascades when other nodes reach certain thresholds of neighbor
influence, and the goal is to maximize the final number of influenced nodes.
Despite extensive study from both practical and theoretical viewpoints, this
model limits the designer to a binary choice for each node, with no way to
apply intermediate levels of influence. This model captures some settings
precisely, e.g. exposure to an idea or pathogen, but it fails to capture very
relevant concerns in others, for example, a manufacturer promoting a new
product by distributing five "20% off" coupons instead of giving away one free
product.
While fractional versions of problems tend to be easier to solve than
integral versions, for influence maximization, we show that the two versions
have essentially the same computational complexity. On the other hand, the two
versions can have vastly different solutions: the added flexibility of
fractional allocation can lead to significantly improved influence. Our main
theoretical contribution is to show how to adapt the major positive results
from the integral case to the fractional case. Specifically, Mossel and Roch
(2006) used the submodularity of influence to obtain their integral results; we
introduce a new notion of continuous submodularity, and use this to obtain
matching fractional results. We conclude that we can achieve the same greedy
-approximation for the fractional case as the integral case.
In practice, we find that the fractional model performs substantially better
than the integral model, according to simulations on real-world social network
data
Validating Network Value of Influencers by means of Explanations
Recently, there has been significant interest in social influence analysis.
One of the central problems in this area is the problem of identifying
influencers, such that by convincing these users to perform a certain action
(like buying a new product), a large number of other users get influenced to
follow the action. The client of such an application is a marketer who would
target these influencers for marketing a given new product, say by providing
free samples or discounts. It is natural that before committing resources for
targeting an influencer the marketer would be interested in validating the
influence (or network value) of influencers returned. This requires digging
deeper into such analytical questions as: who are their followers, on what
actions (or products) they are influential, etc. However, the current
approaches to identifying influencers largely work as a black box in this
respect. The goal of this paper is to open up the black box, address these
questions and provide informative and crisp explanations for validating the
network value of influencers.
We formulate the problem of providing explanations (called PROXI) as a
discrete optimization problem of feature selection. We show that PROXI is not
only NP-hard to solve exactly, it is NP-hard to approximate within any
reasonable factor. Nevertheless, we show interesting properties of the
objective function and develop an intuitive greedy heuristic. We perform
detailed experimental analysis on two real world datasets - Twitter and
Flixster, and show that our approach is useful in generating concise and
insightful explanations of the influence distribution of users and that our
greedy algorithm is effective and efficient with respect to several baselines
Minimizing Seed Set Selection with Probabilistic Coverage Guarantee in a Social Network
A topic propagating in a social network reaches its tipping point if the
number of users discussing it in the network exceeds a critical threshold such
that a wide cascade on the topic is likely to occur. In this paper, we consider
the task of selecting initial seed users of a topic with minimum size so that
with a guaranteed probability the number of users discussing the topic would
reach a given threshold. We formulate the task as an optimization problem
called seed minimization with probabilistic coverage guarantee (SM-PCG). This
problem departs from the previous studies on social influence maximization or
seed minimization because it considers influence coverage with probabilistic
guarantees instead of guarantees on expected influence coverage. We show that
the problem is not submodular, and thus is harder than previously studied
problems based on submodular function optimization. We provide an approximation
algorithm and show that it approximates the optimal solution with both a
multiplicative ratio and an additive error. The multiplicative ratio is tight
while the additive error would be small if influence coverage distributions of
certain seed sets are well concentrated. For one-way bipartite graphs we
analytically prove the concentration condition and obtain an approximation
algorithm with an multiplicative ratio and an
additive error, where is the total number of nodes in the social graph.
Moreover, we empirically verify the concentration condition in real-world
networks and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed
algorithm comparing to commonly adopted benchmark algorithms.Comment: Conference version will appear in KDD 201
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