English

Improved Submodular Secretary Problem with Shortlists

Data Structures and Algorithms 2021-02-22 v2

Abstract

First, for the for the submodular kk-secretary problem with shortlists [1], we provide a near optimal 11/eϵ1-1/e-\epsilon approximation using shortlist of size O(kpoly(1/ϵ))O(k poly(1/\epsilon)). In particular, we improve the size of shortlist used in \cite{us} from O(k2poly(1/ϵ))O(k 2^{poly(1/\epsilon)}) to O(kpoly(1/ϵ))O(k poly(1/\epsilon)). As a result, we provide a near optimal approximation algorithm for random-order streaming of monotone submodular functions under cardinality constraints, using memory O(kpoly(1/ϵ))O(k poly(1/\epsilon)). It exponentially improves the running time and memory of \cite{us} in terms of 1/ϵ1/\epsilon. Next we generalize the problem to matroid constraints, which we refer to as submodular matroid secretary problem with shortlists. It is a variant of the \textit{matroid secretary problem} \cite{feldman2014simple}, in which the algorithm is allowed to have a shortlist. We design an algorithm that achieves a 12(11/e2ϵ)\frac{1}{2}(1-1/e^2 -\epsilon) competitive ratio for any constant ϵ>0\epsilon>0, using a shortlist of size O(kpoly(1ϵ))O(k poly(\frac{1}{\epsilon})). Moreover, we generalize our results to the case of pp-matchoid constraints and give a 1p+1(11/ep+1ϵ)\frac{1}{p+1}(1-1/e^{p+1}-\epsilon ) approximation using shortlist of size O(kpoly(1ϵ))O(k poly(\frac{1}{\epsilon})). It asymptotically approaches the best known offline guarantee 1p+1\frac{1}{p+1} [22]. Furthermore, we show that our algorithms can be implemented in the streaming setting using O(kpoly(1ϵ))O(k poly(\frac{1}{\epsilon})) memory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.01901,
  title  = {Improved Submodular Secretary Problem with Shortlists},
  author = {Mohammad Shadravan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.01901},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:02:18.312Z