Related papers: The Power of an Example: Hidden Set Size Approxima…
A finite set is "hidden" if its elements are not directly enumerable or if its size cannot be ascertained via a deterministic query. In public health, epidemiology, demography, ecology and intelligence analysis, researchers have developed a…
We are given n base elements and a finite collection of subsets of them. The size of any subset varies between p to k (p < k). In addition, we assume that the input contains all possible subsets of size p. Our objective is to find a…
Given a collection S of subsets of some set U, and M a subset of U, the set cover problem is to find the smallest subcollection C of S such that M is a subset of the union of the sets in C. While the general problem is NP-hard to solve,…
Consider the following variant of the set cover problem. We are given a universe $U=\{1,...,n\}$ and a collection of subsets $\mathcal{C} = \{S_1,...,S_m\}$ where $S_i \subseteq U$. For every element $u \in U$ we need to find a set $\phi(u)…
Let $S$ be a finite set, and $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ an i.i.d. uniform sample from $S$. To estimate the size $|S|$, without further structure, one can wait for repeats and use the birthday problem. This requires a sample size of the order…
In this work we study the set size distribution estimation problem, where elements are randomly sampled from a collection of non-overlapping sets and we seek to recover the original set size distribution from the samples. This problem has…
The dynamic approximate membership problem asks to represent a set S of size n, whose elements are provided in an on-line fashion, supporting membership queries without false negatives and with a false positive rate at most epsilon. That…
Consistent sampling is a technique for specifying, in small space, a subset $S$ of a potentially large universe $U$ such that the elements in $S$ satisfy a suitably chosen sampling condition. Given a subset $\mathcal{I}\subseteq U$ it…
The average properties of the well-known Subset Sum Problem can be studied by the means of its randomised version, where we are given a target value $z$, random variables $X_1, \ldots, X_n$, and an error parameter $\varepsilon > 0$, and we…
Given subsets of uncertain values, we study the problem of identifying the subset of minimum total value (sum of the uncertain values) by querying as few values as possible. This set selection problem falls into the field of explorable…
This paper presents a novel algorithm solving the classic problem of generating a random sample of size s from population of size n with non-uniform probabilities. The sampling is done with replacement. The algorithm requires constant…
For high volume data streams and large data warehouses, sampling is used for efficient approximate answers to aggregate queries over selected subsets. Mathematically, we are dealing with a set of weighted items and want to support queries…
Given a subset of size $k$ of a very large universe a randomized way to find this subset could consist of deleting half of the universe and then searching the remaining part. With a probability of $2^{-k}$ one will succeed. By probability…
Experimental comparisons of performance represent an important aspect of research on optimization algorithms. In this work we present a methodology for defining the required sample sizes for designing experiments with desired statistical…
An algorithm of searching a zero of an unknown undimensional function is considered, measured at a point x with some error. The step sizes are random positive values and are calculated according to the rule: if two consecutive iterations…
We study the problem of estimating the parameters of a Gaussian distribution when samples are only shown if they fall in some (unknown) subset $S \subseteq \R^d$. This core problem in truncated statistics has long history going back to…
Partial Set Cover (PSC) is a generalization of the well-studied Set Cover problem (SC). In PSC the input consists of an integer $k$ and a set system $(U,S)$ where $U$ is a finite set, and $S \subseteq 2^U$ is a collection of subsets of $U$.…
While conformal predictors reap the benefits of rigorous statistical guarantees on their error frequency, the size of their corresponding prediction sets is critical to their practical utility. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of…
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) consist of a set of variables taking values from some finite domain and a set of local constraints on these variables. The objective is to find an assignment to the variables that maximizes the…
This paper studies the \emph{subset sampling} problem. The input is a set $\mathcal{S}$ of $n$ records together with a function $\textbf{p}$ that assigns each record $v\in\mathcal{S}$ a probability $\textbf{p}(v)$. A query returns a random…