We initiate the study of the classical Submodular Cover (SC) problem in the
data streaming model which we refer to as the Streaming Submodular Cover (SSC).
We show that any single pass streaming algorithm using sublinear memory in the
size of the stream will fail to provide any non-trivial approximation
guarantees for SSC. Hence, we consider a relaxed version of SSC, where we only
seek to find a partial cover.
We design the first Efficient bicriteria Submodular Cover Streaming
(ESC-Streaming) algorithm for this problem, and provide theoretical guarantees
for its performance supported by numerical evidence. Our algorithm finds
solutions that are competitive with the near-optimal offline greedy algorithm
despite requiring only a single pass over the data stream. In our numerical
experiments, we evaluate the performance of ESC-Streaming on active set
selection and large-scale graph cover problems.Comment: To appear in NIPS'1