Related papers: Making the Most of Your Samples
The classic *priced query model*, introduced by Charikar et al. (STOC 2000), captures the task of computing a known function on an unknown input when each input variable can only be revealed by paying an associated cost. The goal is to…
The problem of variable-rate lossless data compression is considered, for codes with and without prefix constraints. Sharp bounds are derived for the best achievable compression rate of memoryless sources, when the excess-rate probability…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
This work considers the sample complexity of obtaining an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average reward Markov Decision Process (AMDP), given access to a generative model (simulator). When the ground-truth MDP is weakly communicating,…
This work focuses on a specific classification problem, where the information about a sample is not readily available, but has to be acquired for a cost, and there is a per-sample budget. Inspired by real-world use-cases, we analyze average…
Optimal portfolio selection problems are determined by the (unknown) parameters of the data generating process. If an investor wants to realise the position suggested by the optimal portfolios, he/she needs to estimate the unknown…
We consider an optimal stopping problem with n correlated offers where the goal is to design a (randomized) stopping strategy that maximizes the expected value of the offer in the sequence at which we stop. Instead of assuming to know the…
We study a pricing problem where a seller has $k$ identical copies of a product, buyers arrive sequentially, and the seller prices the items aiming to maximize social welfare. When $k=1$, this is the so called "prophet inequality" problem…
We consider a decision maker who must choose an action in order to maximize a reward function that depends also on an unknown parameter {\Theta}. The decision maker can delay taking the action in order to experiment and gather additional…
We study the problem when a firm sets prices for products based on the transaction data, i.e., which product past customers chose from an assortment and what were the historical prices that they observed. Our approach does not impose a…
Given data on the choices made by consumers for different offer sets, a key challenge is to develop parsimonious models that describe and predict consumer choice behavior while being amenable to prescriptive tasks such as pricing and…
In this work, we propose a method for determining a non-uniform sampling scheme for multi-dimensional signals by solving a convex optimization problem reminiscent of the sensor selection problem. The resulting sampling scheme minimizes the…
We study the sample complexity of stochastic convex optimization when problem parameters, e.g., the distance to optimality, are unknown. We pursue two strategies. First, we develop a reliable model selection method that avoids overfitting…
We study the problem of searching for a target at some unknown location in $\mathbb{R}^d$ when additional information regarding the position of the target is available in the form of predictions. In our setting, predictions come as…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We consider a critically-loaded multiclass queueing control problem with model uncertainty. The model consists of $I$ types of customers and a single server. At any time instant, a decision-maker (DM) allocates the server's effort to the…
Let $\theta_0,\theta_1 \in \mathbb{R}^d$ be the population risk minimizers associated to some loss $\ell:\mathbb{R}^d\times \mathcal{Z}\to\mathbb{R}$ and two distributions $\mathbb{P}_0,\mathbb{P}_1$ on $\mathcal{Z}$. The models…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We introduce and discuss a general criterion for the derivative pricing in the general situation of incomplete markets, we refer to it as the No Almost Sure Arbitrage Principle. This approach is based on the theory of optimal strategy in…
We study the problem, introduced by Qiao and Valiant, of learning from untrusted batches. Here, we assume $m$ users, all of whom have samples from some underlying distribution $p$ over $1, \ldots, n$. Each user sends a batch of $k$ i.i.d.…