78,194 research outputs found
RRR: Rank-Regret Representative
Selecting the best items in a dataset is a common task in data exploration.
However, the concept of "best" lies in the eyes of the beholder: different
users may consider different attributes more important, and hence arrive at
different rankings. Nevertheless, one can remove "dominated" items and create a
"representative" subset of the data set, comprising the "best items" in it. A
Pareto-optimal representative is guaranteed to contain the best item of each
possible ranking, but it can be almost as big as the full data. Representative
can be found if we relax the requirement to include the best item for every
possible user, and instead just limit the users' "regret". Existing work
defines regret as the loss in score by limiting consideration to the
representative instead of the full data set, for any chosen ranking function.
However, the score is often not a meaningful number and users may not
understand its absolute value. Sometimes small ranges in score can include
large fractions of the data set. In contrast, users do understand the notion of
rank ordering. Therefore, alternatively, we consider the position of the items
in the ranked list for defining the regret and propose the {\em rank-regret
representative} as the minimal subset of the data containing at least one of
the top- of any possible ranking function. This problem is NP-complete. We
use the geometric interpretation of items to bound their ranks on ranges of
functions and to utilize combinatorial geometry notions for developing
effective and efficient approximation algorithms for the problem. Experiments
on real datasets demonstrate that we can efficiently find small subsets with
small rank-regrets
Stackelberg Network Pricing Games
We study a multi-player one-round game termed Stackelberg Network Pricing
Game, in which a leader can set prices for a subset of priceable edges in a
graph. The other edges have a fixed cost. Based on the leader's decision one or
more followers optimize a polynomial-time solvable combinatorial minimization
problem and choose a minimum cost solution satisfying their requirements based
on the fixed costs and the leader's prices. The leader receives as revenue the
total amount of prices paid by the followers for priceable edges in their
solutions, and the problem is to find revenue maximizing prices. Our model
extends several known pricing problems, including single-minded and unit-demand
pricing, as well as Stackelberg pricing for certain follower problems like
shortest path or minimum spanning tree. Our first main result is a tight
analysis of a single-price algorithm for the single follower game, which
provides a -approximation for any . This can
be extended to provide a -approximation for the
general problem and followers. The latter result is essentially best
possible, as the problem is shown to be hard to approximate within
\mathcal{O(\log^\epsilon k + \log^\epsilon m). If followers have demands, the
single-price algorithm provides a -approximation, and the
problem is hard to approximate within \mathcal{O(m^\epsilon) for some
. Our second main result is a polynomial time algorithm for
revenue maximization in the special case of Stackelberg bipartite vertex cover,
which is based on non-trivial max-flow and LP-duality techniques. Our results
can be extended to provide constant-factor approximations for any constant
number of followers
The Geometry of Scheduling
We consider the following general scheduling problem: The input consists of n
jobs, each with an arbitrary release time, size, and a monotone function
specifying the cost incurred when the job is completed at a particular time.
The objective is to find a preemptive schedule of minimum aggregate cost. This
problem formulation is general enough to include many natural scheduling
objectives, such as weighted flow, weighted tardiness, and sum of flow squared.
Our main result is a randomized polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation
ratio O(log log nP), where P is the maximum job size. We also give an O(1)
approximation in the special case when all jobs have identical release times.
The main idea is to reduce this scheduling problem to a particular geometric
set-cover problem which is then solved using the local ratio technique and
Varadarajan's quasi-uniform sampling technique. This general algorithmic
approach improves the best known approximation ratios by at least an
exponential factor (and much more in some cases) for essentially all of the
nontrivial common special cases of this problem. Our geometric interpretation
of scheduling may be of independent interest.Comment: Conference version in FOCS 201
A Constant-Factor Approximation for Multi-Covering with Disks
We consider variants of the following multi-covering problem with disks. We
are given two point sets (servers) and (clients) in the plane, a
coverage function , and a constant . Centered at each server is a single disk whose radius we are free to
set. The requirement is that each client be covered by at least
of the server disks. The objective function we wish to minimize is
the sum of the -th powers of the disk radii. We present a polynomial
time algorithm for this problem achieving an approximation
Message and time efficient multi-broadcast schemes
We consider message and time efficient broadcasting and multi-broadcasting in
wireless ad-hoc networks, where a subset of nodes, each with a unique rumor,
wish to broadcast their rumors to all destinations while minimizing the total
number of transmissions and total time until all rumors arrive to their
destination. Under centralized settings, we introduce a novel approximation
algorithm that provides almost optimal results with respect to the number of
transmissions and total time, separately. Later on, we show how to efficiently
implement this algorithm under distributed settings, where the nodes have only
local information about their surroundings. In addition, we show multiple
approximation techniques based on the network collision detection capabilities
and explain how to calibrate the algorithms' parameters to produce optimal
results for time and messages.Comment: In Proceedings FOMC 2013, arXiv:1310.459
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