Related papers: Sampling with Costs
The selection of the best classification algorithm for a given dataset is a very widespread problem. It is also a complex one, in the sense it requires to make several important methodological choices. Among them, in this work we focus on…
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 era of huge data necessitates highly efficient machine learning algorithms. Many common machine learning algorithms, however, rely on computationally intensive subroutines that are prohibitively expensive on large datasets. Oftentimes,…
Sampling from very large spatial populations is challenging. The solutions suggested in recent literature on this subject often require that the randomly selected units are well distributed across the study region by using complex…
When, in terms of the number of data points, the size of a dataset exceeds available computing resources, or when labeling is expensive, an attractive solution consists of selecting only some of the data points (subdata) for further…
A wide variety of optimization techniques, both exact and heuristic, tend to be biased samplers. This means that when attempting to find multiple uncorrelated solutions of a degenerate Boolean optimization problem a subset of the solution…
In computing, as in many aspects of life, changes incur cost. Many optimization problems are formulated as a one-time instance starting from scratch. However, a common case that arises is when we already have a set of prior assignments, and…
The computational costs of inference and planning have confined Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning to one of two dismal fates: powerful Bayes-adaptive planning but only for simplistic models, or powerful, Bayesian non-parametric…
We study the problem of setting a price for a potential buyer with a valuation drawn from an unknown distribution $D$. The seller has "data"' about $D$ in the form of $m \ge 1$ i.i.d. samples, and the algorithmic challenge is to use these…
This paper studies the sample complexity (aka number of comparisons) bounds for the active best-$k$ items selection from pairwise comparisons. From a given set of items, the learner can make pairwise comparisons on every pair of items, and…
Choice overload - in which larger choice sets are detrimental to a chooser's well-being - is potentially of great importance in the design of economic policy. Yet the current evidence on its prevalence is inconclusive. We argue that…
We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…
A wide variety of problems in machine learning, including exemplar clustering, document summarization, and sensor placement, can be cast as constrained submodular maximization problems. Unfortunately, the resulting submodular optimization…
We observe a random measure $N$ and aim at estimating its intensity $s$. This statistical framework allows to deal simultaneously with the problems of estimating a density, the marginals of a multivariate distribution, the mean of a random…
We investigate Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), a partial information setting where examples in a training set are grouped into bags, and only aggregate label values in each bag are available. Despite the partial observability, the…
Optimization software enables the solution of problems with millions of variables and associated parameters. These parameters are, however, often uncertain and represented with an analytical description of the parameter's distribution or…
Suppose we have a memory storing $0$s and $1$s and we want to estimate the frequency of $1$s by sampling. We want to do this I/O-efficiently, exploiting that each read gives a block of $B$ bits at unit cost; not just one bit. If the input…
Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically, probabilistic sampling…
Suppose one desires to randomly sample a pair of objects such as socks, hoping to get a matching pair. Even in the simplest situation for sampling, which is sampling with replacement, the innocent phrase "the distribution of the color of a…
We consider the problem of constructing probabilistic predictions that lead to accurate decisions when employed by downstream users to inform actions. For a single decision maker, designing an optimal predictor is equivalent to minimizing a…