Related papers: Making the Most of Your Samples
We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\mu$ with density $\propto e^{-V}$ for some potential function $V:\mathbb R^d\to \mathbb R$ with query access to $V$ and $\nabla V$. We start with the following standard assumptions: (1)…
We study the classic setting of envy-free pricing, in which a single seller chooses prices for its many items, with the goal of maximizing revenue once the items are allocated. Despite the large body of work addressing such settings, most…
We compute the integral of a function or the expectation of a random variable with minimal cost and use, for our new algorithm and for upper bounds of the complexity, i.i.d. samples. Under certain assumptions it is possible to select a…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ symbols, given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution. We are interested in minimizing the KL divergence between the true distribution and the…
In this work we analyze the problem of, given the probability distribution of a population, questioning an unknown individual that is representative of the distribution so that our uncertainty about certain characteristics is significantly…
We study the problem of learning exponential distributions under differential privacy. Given $n$ i.i.d.\ samples from $\mathrm{Exp}(\lambda)$, the goal is to privately estimate $\lambda$ so that the learned distribution is close in total…
We study auction design when a seller relies on machine-learning predictions of bidders' valuations that may be unreliable. Motivated by modern ML systems that are often accurate but occasionally fail in a way that is essentially…
We consider a Bayesian forecast aggregation model where $n$ experts, after observing private signals about an unknown binary event, report their posterior beliefs about the event to a principal, who then aggregates the reports into a single…
This paper considers the problem of estimating a power-law degree distribution of an undirected network using sampled data. Although power-law degree distributions are ubiquitous in nature, the widely used parametric methods for estimating…
Real-world pricing mechanisms are typically optimized using training data, a setting corresponding to the \textit{pricing query complexity} problem in Mechanism Design. The previous work [LSTW23] studies the \textit{single-distribution}…
We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…
We study the problem of sampling from a target distribution in $\mathbb{R}^d$ whose potential is not smooth. Compared with the sampling problem with smooth potentials, this problem is much less well-understood due to the lack of smoothness.…
Price determination is a central research topic of revenue management in marketing. The important aspect in pricing is controlling the stochastic behavior of demand, and the previous studies have tackled price optimization problems with…
Given samples from an unknown distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ belongs to some class of distributions $\mathcal{C}$ versus $p$ being far from every distribution in $\mathcal{C}$? This fundamental question has…
When sample data are governed by an unknown sequence of independent but possibly non-identical distributions, the data-generating process (DGP) in general cannot be perfectly identified from the data. For making decisions facing such…
We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…
Importance sampling of target probability distributions belonging to a given convex class is considered. Motivated by previous results, the cost of importance sampling is quantified using the relative entropy of the target with respect to…
The $\textit{data market design}$ problem is a problem in economic theory to find a set of signaling schemes (statistical experiments) to maximize expected revenue to the information seller, where each experiment reveals some of the…
Consider the task of generating samples from a tilted distribution of a random vector whose underlying distribution is unknown, but samples from it are available. This finds applications in fields such as finance and climate science, and in…