Related papers: Minimum Entropy Submodular Optimization (and Fairn…
We study the problem of identifying the causal relationship between two discrete random variables from observational data. We recently proposed a novel framework called entropic causality that works in a very general functional model but…
Often times, in many design problems, there is a need to select a small set of informative or representative elements from a large ground set of entities in an optimal fashion. Submodular optimization that provides for a formal way to solve…
We propose a new concept named adaptive submodularity ratio to study the greedy policy for sequential decision making. While the greedy policy is known to perform well for a wide variety of adaptive stochastic optimization problems in…
Greedy algorithms are widely used for problems in machine learning such as feature selection and set function optimization. Unfortunately, for large datasets, the running time of even greedy algorithms can be quite high. This is because for…
We study the approximability of the maximum size independent set (MIS) problem in bounded degree graphs. This is one of the most classic and widely studied NP-hard optimization problems. We focus on the well known minimum degree greedy…
We provide theoretical bounds on the worst case performance of the greedy algorithm in seeking to maximize a normalized, monotone, but not necessarily submodular objective function under a simple partition matroid constraint. We also…
Given a set of discrete probability distributions, the minimum entropy coupling is the minimum entropy joint distribution that has the input distributions as its marginals. This has immediate relevance to tasks such as entropic causal…
Submodular optimization is a special class of combinatorial optimization arising in several machine learning problems, but also in cooperative control of complex systems. In this paper, we consider agents in an asynchronous, unreliable and…
The submodular maximization problem is widely applicable in many engineering problems where objectives exhibit diminishing returns. While this problem is known to be NP-hard for certain subclasses of objective functions, there is a greedy…
In machine learning and big data, the optimization objectives based on set-cover, entropy, diversity, influence, feature selection, etc. are commonly modeled as submodular functions. Submodular (function) maximization is generally NP-hard,…
We study the problem of selecting a subset of vectors from a large set, to obtain the best signal representation over a family of functions. Although greedy methods have been widely used for tackling this problem and many of those have been…
We study influence maximization on temporal networks. This is a special setting where the influence function is not submodular, and there is no optimality guarantee for solutions achieved via greedy optimization. We perform an exhaustive…
We consider the optimisation problem of adding $k$ links to a given network, such that the resulting effective graph resistance is as small as possible. The problem was recently proven to be NP-hard, such that optimal solutions obtained…
We consider a class of discrete optimization problems that aim to maximize a submodular objective function subject to a distributed partition matroid constraint. More precisely, we consider a networked scenario in which multiple agents…
We examine the minimum entropy coupling problem, where one must find the minimum entropy variable that has a given set of distributions $S = \{p_1, \dots, p_m \}$ as its marginals. Although this problem is NP-Hard, previous works have…
A $k$-submodular function naturally generalizes submodular functions by taking as input $k$ disjoint subsets, rather than a single subset. Unlike standard submodular maximization, which only requires selecting elements for the solution,…
Submodularity is a key property in discrete optimization. Submodularity has been widely used for analyzing the greedy algorithm to give performance bounds and providing insight into the construction of valid inequalities for mixed-integer…
This paper defines weak-$\alpha$-supermodularity for set functions. Many optimization objectives in machine learning and data mining seek to minimize such functions under cardinality constrains. We prove that such problems benefit from a…
Submodular functions are well-studied in combinatorial optimization, game theory and economics. The natural diminishing returns property makes them suitable for many applications. We study an extension of monotone submodular functions,…
Many important optimization problems, such as the minimum spanning tree and minimum-cost flow, can be solved optimally by a greedy method. In this work, we study a learning variant of these problems, where the model of the problem is…