Integrated Optimization of Bipartite Matching and Its Stochastic Behavior: New Formulation and Approximation Algorithm via Min-cost Flow Optimization

The research field of stochastic matching has yielded many developments for various applications. In most stochastic matching problems, the probability distributions inherent in the nodes and edges are set a priori, and are not controllable. However, many matching services have options, which we call control variables, that affect the probability distributions and thus what constitutes an optimum matching. Although several methods for optimizing the values of the control variables have been developed, their optimization in consideration of the matching problem is still in its infancy. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem for determining the values of the control variables so as to maximize the expected value of matching weights. Since this problem involves hard to evaluate objective values and is non-convex, we construct an approximation algorithm via a minimum-cost flow algorithm that can find 3-approximation solutions rapidly. Simulations on real data from a ride-hailing platform and a crowd-sourcing market show that the proposed method can find solutions with high profits of the service provider in practical time

A Cluster-Aware Transfer Learning for Bayesian Optimization of Personalized Preference Models

Obtaining personalized models of the crowd is an important issue in various applications, such as preference acquisition and user interaction customization. However, the crowd setting, in which we assume we have little knowledge about the person, brings the cold start problem, which may cause avoidable unpreferable interactions with the people. This paper proposes a cluster-aware transfer learning method for the Bayesian optimization of personalized models. The proposed method, called Cluster-aware Bayesian Optimization, is designed based on a known feature: user preferences are not completely independent but can be divided into clusters. It exploits the clustering information to efficiently find the preference of the crowds while avoiding unpreferable interactions. The results of our extensive experiments with different data sets show that the method is efficient for finding the most preferable items and effective in reducing the number of unpreferable interactions