Related papers: Beating 1-1/e for Ordered Prophets
Motivated by an application in kidney exchange, we study the following query-commit problem: we are given the set of vertices of a non-bipartite graph G. The set of edges in this graph are not known ahead of time. We can query any pair of…
Goemans and Williamson proposed a randomized rounding algorithm for the MAX-CUT problem with a 0.878 approximation bound in expectation. The 0.878 approximation bound remains the best-known approximation bound for this APX-hard problem.…
We consider two classic problems: maximum coverage and monotone submodular maximization subject to a cardinality constraint. [Nemhauser--Wolsey--Fisher '78] proved that the greedy algorithm provides an approximation of $1-1/e$ for both…
A pair of probability distributions over $\{0,1\}^n$ is said to be $(k,\delta)$-wise indistinguishable if all of the size $k$ marginals are within statistical distance at most $\delta$. Previous works introduced this concept and study when…
Since Tinhofer proposed the MinGreedy algorithm for maximum cardinality matching in 1984, several experimental studies found the randomized algorithm to perform excellently for various classes of random graphs and benchmark instances. In…
Prophet inequalities are fundamental optimal stopping problems, where a decision-maker observes sequentially items with values sampled independently from known distributions, and must decide at each new observation to either stop and gain…
A central question in information theory is to determine the maximum success probability that can be achieved in sending a fixed number of messages over a noisy channel. This was first studied in the pioneering work of Shannon who…
We study fair allocation of indivisible goods to agents with unequal entitlements. Fair allocation has been the subject of many studies in both divisible and indivisible settings. Our emphasis is on the case where the goods are indivisible…
This paper studies hypothesis testing and parameter estimation in the context of the divide and conquer algorithm. In a unified likelihood based framework, we propose new test statistics and point estimators obtained by aggregating various…
A matching in a graph is induced if no two of its edges are joined by an edge, and finding a large induced matching is a very hard problem. Lin et al. (Approximating weighted induced matchings, Discrete Applied Mathematics 243 (2018)…
We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions. In the standard model, where we have sample access to an underlying distribution $p$, extensive research has established optimal bounds for uniformity testing,…
This paper answers a long-standing open question concerning the $1/e$-strategy for the problem of best choice. $N$ candidates for a job arrive at times independently uniformly distributed in $[0,1]$. The interviewer knows how each candidate…
This note records a common threshold/surplus decomposition for single-threshold stopping rules in the classical prophet inequality. The same decomposition is used to certify several deterministic thresholds, including the median, half-mean,…
We present deterministic distributed algorithms for computing approximate maximum cardinality matchings and approximate maximum weight matchings. Our algorithm for the unweighted case computes a matching whose size is at least $(1-\eps)$…
Consider the following social choice problem. Suppose we have a set of $n$ voters and $m$ candidates that lie in a metric space. The goal is to design a mechanism to choose a candidate whose average distance to the voters is as small as…
We consider the following stochastic optimization problem first introduced by Chen et al. in \cite{chen}. We are given a vertex set of a random graph where each possible edge is present with probability p_e. We do not know which edges are…
We provide new upper and lower bounds on the minimum possible ratio of the spectral and Frobenius norms of a (partially) symmetric tensor. In the particular case of general tensors our result recovers a known upper bound. For symmetric…
Knapsack is one of the most fundamental problems in theoretical computer science. In the $(1 - \epsilon)$-approximation setting, although there is a fine-grained lower bound of $(n + 1 / \epsilon) ^ {2 - o(1)}$ based on the $(\min,…
Online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs) were proposed by Feldman, Svensson, and Zenklusen as a generic technique to round a fractional solution in the matroid polytope in an online fashion. It has found applications in several…
In this paper we consider the Stochastic Matching problem, which is motivated by applications in kidney exchange and online dating. We are given an undirected graph in which every edge is assigned a probability of existence and a positive…