Related papers: Approximation of target problems in Blackwell spac…
The problem of controlling a finite state Markov chain in the presence of an adversary so as to ensure desired performance levels for a vector of objectives is cast in the framework of Blackwell approachability. Relying on an elementary two…
Based on information theory, we present a method to determine an optimal Markov approximation for modelling and prediction from time series data. The method finds a balance between minimal modelling errors by taking as much as possible…
We develop a framework for the compression of reversible Markov chains with rigorous error control. Given a subset of selected states, we construct reduced dynamics that can be lifted to an approximation of the full dynamics, and we prove…
This article presents a constrained policy optimization approach for the optimal control of systems under nonstationary uncertainties. We introduce an assumption that we call Markov embeddability that allows us to cast the stochastic…
Reversibility is a key property of Markov chains, central to algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings and other MCMC methods. Yet many applications yield non-reversible chains, motivating the problem of approximating them by reversible ones…
In systems of programmable matter, we are given a collection of simple computation elements (or particles) with limited (constant-size) memory. We are interested in when they can self-organize to solve system-wide problems of movement,…
Instance sparsification is well-known in the world of exact computation since it is very closely linked to the Exponential Time Hypothesis. In this paper, we extend the concept of sparsification in order to capture subexponential time…
We consider the problem of optimally compressing and caching data across a communication network. Given the data generated at edge nodes and a routing path, our goal is to determine the optimal data compression ratios and caching decisions…
We study the computational complexity of approximating general constrained Markov decision processes. Our primary contribution is the design of a polynomial time $(0,\epsilon)$-additive bicriteria approximation algorithm for finding optimal…
As a main step in the numerical solution of control problems in continuous time, the controlled process is approximated by sequences of controlled Markov chains, thus discretising time and space. A new feature in this context is to allow…
This paper is dedicated to the investigation of a new numerical method to approximate the optimal stopping problem for a discrete-time continuous state space Markov chain under partial observations. It is based on a two-step discretization…
We develop approximation algorithms for set-selection problems with deterministic constraints, but random objective values, i.e., stochastic probing problems. When the goal is to maximize the objective, approximation algorithms for probing…
Black-box complexity is a complexity theoretic measure for how difficult a problem is to be optimized by a general purpose optimization algorithm. It is thus one of the few means trying to understand which problems are tractable for genetic…
Matrix rank minimization problems are gaining a plenty of recent attention in both mathematical and engineering fields. This class of problems, arising in various and across-discipline applications, is known to be NP-hard in general. In…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…
In this paper, we address the approximate minimization problem of Markov Chains (MCs) from a behavioral metric-based perspective. Specifically, given a finite MC and a positive integer k, we are looking for an MC with at most k states…
Large-scale eigenvalue problems arise in various fields of science and engineering and demand computationally efficient solutions. In this study, we investigate the subspace approximation for parametric linear eigenvalue problems, aiming to…
In this article we propose a Weighted Stochastic Mesh (WSM) Algorithm for approximating the value of a discrete and continuous time optimal stopping problem. We prove that in the discrete case the WSM algorithm leads to semi-tractability of…
We revisit the matrix problems sparse null space and matrix sparsification, and show that they are equivalent. We then proceed to seek algorithms for these problems: We prove the hardness of approximation of these problems, and also give a…
This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…