We study a problem of optimal information gathering from multiple data
providers that need to be incentivized to provide accurate information. This
problem arises in many real world applications that rely on crowdsourced data
sets, but where the process of obtaining data is costly. A notable example of
such a scenario is crowd sensing. To this end, we formulate the problem of
optimal information gathering as maximization of a submodular function under a
budget constraint, where the budget represents the total expected payment to
data providers. Contrary to the existing approaches, we base our payments on
incentives for accuracy and truthfulness, in particular, {\em peer-prediction}
methods that score each of the selected data providers against its best peer,
while ensuring that the minimum expected payment is above a given threshold. We
first show that the problem at hand is hard to approximate within a constant
factor that is not dependent on the properties of the payment function.
However, for given topological and analytical properties of the instance, we
construct two greedy algorithms, respectively called PPCGreedy and
PPCGreedyIter, and establish theoretical bounds on their performance w.r.t. the
optimal solution. Finally, we evaluate our methods using a realistic crowd
sensing testbed.Comment: Longer version of AAAI'18 pape
