On facility location problem in the local differential privacy model

In this paper we study the uncapacitated facility location problem in the model of differential privacy (DP) with uniform facility cost. Specifically, we first show that, under the hierarchically well-separated tree (HST) metrics and the super-set output setting that was introduced in [8], there is an  ∊-DP algorithm that achieves an O (¹/∊) expected multiplicative) approximation ratio; this implies an O( ^log n/_∊) approximation ratio for the general metric case, where n is the size of the input metric. These bounds improve the best-known results given by [8]. In particular, our approximation ratio for HST-metrics is independent of n, and the ratio for general metrics is independent of the aspect ratio of the input metric. On the negative side, we show that the approximation ratio of any  ∊-DP algorithm is lower bounded by Ω (1/√∊), even for instances on HST metrics with uniform facility cost, under the super-set output setting. The lower bound shows that the dependence of the approximation ratio for HST metrics on ∊ can not be removed or greatly improved. Our novel methods and techniques for both the upper and lower bound may find additional applications.CNS-2040249 - National Science Foundationhttps://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/cohen-addad22a/cohen-addad22a.pdfFirst author draf

Separable Concave Optimization Approximately Equals Piecewise-Linear Optimization

We study the problem of minimizing a nonnegative separable concave function over a compact feasible set. We approximate this problem to within a factor of 1+epsilon by a piecewise-linear minimization problem over the same feasible set. Our main result is that when the feasible set is a polyhedron, the number of resulting pieces is polynomial in the input size of the polyhedron and linear in 1/epsilon. For many practical concave cost problems, the resulting piecewise-linear cost problem can be formulated as a well-studied discrete optimization problem. As a result, a variety of polynomial-time exact algorithms, approximation algorithms, and polynomial-time heuristics for discrete optimization problems immediately yield fully polynomial-time approximation schemes, approximation algorithms, and polynomial-time heuristics for the corresponding concave cost problems. We illustrate our approach on two problems. For the concave cost multicommodity flow problem, we devise a new heuristic and study its performance using computational experiments. We are able to approximately solve significantly larger test instances than previously possible, and obtain solutions on average within 4.27% of optimality. For the concave cost facility location problem, we obtain a new 1.4991+epsilon approximation algorithm.Comment: Full pape

Fully Dynamic Consistent Facility Location

We consider classic clustering problems in fully dynamic data streams, where data elements can be both inserted and deleted. In this context, several parameters are of importance: (1) the quality of the solution after each insertion or deletion, (2) the time it takes to update the solution, and (3) how different consecutive solutions are. The question of obtaining efficient algorithms in this context for facility location, k-median and k-means has been raised in a recent paper by Hubert-Chan et al. [WWW'18] and also appears as a natural follow-up on the online model with recourse studied by Lattanzi and Vassilvitskii [ICML'17] (i.e.: in insertion-only streams). In this paper, we focus on general metric spaces and mainly on the facility location problem. We give an arguably simple algorithm that maintains a constant factor approximation, with O(n log n) update time, and total recourse O(n). This improves over the naive algorithm which consists in recomputing a solution at each time step and that can take up to O(n^2) update time, and O(n^2) total recourse. These bounds are nearly optimal: in general metric space, inserting a point take O(n) times to describe the distances to other points, and we give a simple lower bound of O(n) for the recourse. Moreover, we generalize this result for the k-medians and k-means problems: our algorithm maintains a constant factor approximation in time O˜(n+k^2). We complement our analysis with experiments showing that the cost of the solution maintained by our algorithm at any time t is very close to the cost of a solution obtained by quickly recomputing a solution from scratch at time t while having a much better running time

Truthful Facility Assignment with Resource Augmentation: An Exact Analysis of Serial Dictatorship

We study the truthful facility assignment problem, where a set of agents with private most-preferred points on a metric space are assigned to facilities that lie on the metric space, under capacity constraints on the facilities. The goal is to produce such an assignment that minimizes the social cost, i.e., the total distance between the most-preferred points of the agents and their corresponding facilities in the assignment, under the constraint of truthfulness, which ensures that agents do not misreport their most-preferred points. We propose a resource augmentation framework, where a truthful mechanism is evaluated by its worst-case performance on an instance with enhanced facility capacities against the optimal mechanism on the same instance with the original capacities. We study a very well-known mechanism, Serial Dictatorship, and provide an exact analysis of its performance. Although Serial Dictatorship is a purely combinatorial mechanism, our analysis uses linear programming; a linear program expresses its greedy nature as well as the structure of the input, and finds the input instance that enforces the mechanism have its worst-case performance. Bounding the objective of the linear program using duality arguments allows us to compute tight bounds on the approximation ratio. Among other results, we prove that Serial Dictatorship has approximation ratio $g/(g-2)$ when the capacities are multiplied by any integer $g \geq 3$. Our results suggest that even a limited augmentation of the resources can have wondrous effects on the performance of the mechanism and in particular, the approximation ratio goes to 1 as the augmentation factor becomes large. We complement our results with bounds on the approximation ratio of Random Serial Dictatorship, the randomized version of Serial Dictatorship, when there is no resource augmentation

A computational analysis of lower bounds for big bucket production planning problems

In this paper, we analyze a variety of approaches to obtain lower bounds for multi-level production planning problems with big bucket capacities, i.e., problems in which multiple items compete for the same resources. We give an extensive survey of both known and new methods, and also establish relationships between some of these methods that, to our knowledge, have not been presented before. As will be highlighted, understanding the substructures of difficult problems provide crucial insights on why these problems are hard to solve, and this is addressed by a thorough analysis in the paper. We conclude with computational results on a variety of widely used test sets, and a discussion of future research

Fully Dynamic Consistent Facility Location

We consider classic clustering problems in fully dynamic data streams, where data elements can be both inserted and deleted. In this context, several parameters are of importance: (1) the quality of the solution after each insertion or deletion, (2) the time it takes to update the solution, and (3) how different consecutive solutions are. The question of obtaining efficient algorithms in this context for facility location, k-median and k-means has been raised in a recent paper by Hubert-Chan et al. [WWW'18] and also appears as a natural follow-up on the online model with recourse studied by Lattanzi and Vassilvitskii [ICML'17] (i.e.: in insertion-only streams). In this paper, we focus on general metric spaces and mainly on the facility location problem. We give an arguably simple algorithm that maintains a constant factor approximation, with O(n log n) update time, and total recourse O(n). This improves over the naive algorithm which consists in recomputing a solution at each time step and that can take up to O(n^2) update time, and O(n^2) total recourse. These bounds are nearly optimal: in general metric space, inserting a point take O(n) times to describe the distances to other points, and we give a simple lower bound of O(n) for the recourse. Moreover, we generalize this result for the k-medians and k-means problems: our algorithm maintains a constant factor approximation in time O˜(n+k^2). We complement our analysis with experiments showing that the cost of the solution maintained by our algorithm at any time t is very close to the cost of a solution obtained by quickly recomputing a solution from scratch at time t while having a much better running time

A heuristic approach for big bucket multi-level production planning problems

Multi-level production planning problems in which multiple items compete for the same resources frequently occur in practice, yet remain daunting in their difficulty to solve. In this paper, we propose a heuristic framework that can generate high quality feasible solutions quickly for various kinds of lot-sizing problems. In addition, unlike many other heuristics, it generates high quality lower bounds using strong formulations, and its simple scheme allows it to be easily implemented in the Xpress-Mosel modeling language. Extensive computational results from widely used test sets that include a variety of problems demonstrate the efficiency of the heuristic, particularly for challenging problems