472 research outputs found
Submodular Optimization with Submodular Cover and Submodular Knapsack Constraints
We investigate two new optimization problems -- minimizing a submodular
function subject to a submodular lower bound constraint (submodular cover) and
maximizing a submodular function subject to a submodular upper bound constraint
(submodular knapsack). We are motivated by a number of real-world applications
in machine learning including sensor placement and data subset selection, which
require maximizing a certain submodular function (like coverage or diversity)
while simultaneously minimizing another (like cooperative cost). These problems
are often posed as minimizing the difference between submodular functions [14,
35] which is in the worst case inapproximable. We show, however, that by
phrasing these problems as constrained optimization, which is more natural for
many applications, we achieve a number of bounded approximation guarantees. We
also show that both these problems are closely related and an approximation
algorithm solving one can be used to obtain an approximation guarantee for the
other. We provide hardness results for both problems thus showing that our
approximation factors are tight up to log-factors. Finally, we empirically
demonstrate the performance and good scalability properties of our algorithms.Comment: 23 pages. A short version of this appeared in Advances of NIPS-201
Lazier Than Lazy Greedy
Is it possible to maximize a monotone submodular function faster than the
widely used lazy greedy algorithm (also known as accelerated greedy), both in
theory and practice? In this paper, we develop the first linear-time algorithm
for maximizing a general monotone submodular function subject to a cardinality
constraint. We show that our randomized algorithm, STOCHASTIC-GREEDY, can
achieve a approximation guarantee, in expectation, to the
optimum solution in time linear in the size of the data and independent of the
cardinality constraint. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our
algorithm on submodular functions arising in data summarization, including
training large-scale kernel methods, exemplar-based clustering, and sensor
placement. We observe that STOCHASTIC-GREEDY practically achieves the same
utility value as lazy greedy but runs much faster. More surprisingly, we
observe that in many practical scenarios STOCHASTIC-GREEDY does not evaluate
the whole fraction of data points even once and still achieves
indistinguishable results compared to lazy greedy.Comment: In Proc. Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 201
- …