142 research outputs found
Through the lens of sequence submodularity
Several real-world problems in engineering and applied science require the selection of sequences that maximize a given reward function. Optimizing over sequences as opposed to sets requires exploring an exponentially larger search space and can become prohibitive in most cases of practical interest. However, if the objective function is submodular (intuitively, it exhibits a diminishing return property), the optimization problem becomes more manageable. Recently, there has been increasing interest in sequence submodularity in connection with applications such as recommender systems and online ad allocation. However, mostly ad hoc models and solutions have emerged within these applicative contexts. In consequence, the field appears fragmented and lacks coherence. In this paper, we offer a unified view of sequence submodularity and provide a generalized greedy algorithm that enjoys strong theoretical guarantees. We show how our approach naturally captures several application domains, and our algorithm encompasses existing methods, improving over them
Structured Sparsity: Discrete and Convex approaches
Compressive sensing (CS) exploits sparsity to recover sparse or compressible
signals from dimensionality reducing, non-adaptive sensing mechanisms. Sparsity
is also used to enhance interpretability in machine learning and statistics
applications: While the ambient dimension is vast in modern data analysis
problems, the relevant information therein typically resides in a much lower
dimensional space. However, many solutions proposed nowadays do not leverage
the true underlying structure. Recent results in CS extend the simple sparsity
idea to more sophisticated {\em structured} sparsity models, which describe the
interdependency between the nonzero components of a signal, allowing to
increase the interpretability of the results and lead to better recovery
performance. In order to better understand the impact of structured sparsity,
in this chapter we analyze the connections between the discrete models and
their convex relaxations, highlighting their relative advantages. We start with
the general group sparse model and then elaborate on two important special
cases: the dispersive and the hierarchical models. For each, we present the
models in their discrete nature, discuss how to solve the ensuing discrete
problems and then describe convex relaxations. We also consider more general
structures as defined by set functions and present their convex proxies.
Further, we discuss efficient optimization solutions for structured sparsity
problems and illustrate structured sparsity in action via three applications.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figure
Balancing Relevance and Diversity in Online Bipartite Matching via Submodularity
In bipartite matching problems, vertices on one side of a bipartite graph are
paired with those on the other. In its online variant, one side of the graph is
available offline, while the vertices on the other side arrive online. When a
vertex arrives, an irrevocable and immediate decision should be made by the
algorithm; either match it to an available vertex or drop it. Examples of such
problems include matching workers to firms, advertisers to keywords, organs to
patients, and so on. Much of the literature focuses on maximizing the total
relevance---modeled via total weight---of the matching. However, in many
real-world problems, it is also important to consider contributions of
diversity: hiring a diverse pool of candidates, displaying a relevant but
diverse set of ads, and so on. In this paper, we propose the Online Submodular
Bipartite Matching (\osbm) problem, where the goal is to maximize a submodular
function over the set of matched edges. This objective is general enough to
capture the notion of both diversity (\emph{e.g.,} a weighted coverage
function) and relevance (\emph{e.g.,} the traditional linear function)---as
well as many other natural objective functions occurring in practice
(\emph{e.g.,} limited total budget in advertising settings). We propose novel
algorithms that have provable guarantees and are essentially optimal when
restricted to various special cases. We also run experiments on real-world and
synthetic datasets to validate our algorithms.Comment: To appear in AAAI 201
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