Related papers: On the Complexity and Approximation of the Maximum…
We study the problem of optimizing nonlinear objective functions over bipartite matchings. While the problem is generally intractable, we provide several efficient algorithms for it, including a deterministic algorithm for maximizing convex…
We study a type of reverse (procurement) auction problems in the presence of budget constraints. The general algorithmic problem is to purchase a set of resources, which come at a cost, so as not to exceed a given budget and at the same…
We study three two-stage optimization problems with a similar structure and different objectives. In the first stage of each problem, the goal is to assign input jobs of positive sizes to unsplittable bags. After this assignment is decided,…
In the unsplittable flow problem on a path, we are given a capacitated path $P$ and $n$ tasks, each task having a demand, a profit, and start and end vertices. The goal is to compute a maximum profit set of tasks, such that for each edge…
An NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem $\Pi$ is said to have an {\em approximation threshold} if there is some $t$ such that the optimal value of $\Pi$ can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio of $t$, and it is NP-hard…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
We consider the problem of estimating the expected value of information (the knowledge gradient) for Bayesian learning problems where the belief model is nonlinear in the parameters. Our goal is to maximize some metric, while simultaneously…
We study problems with stochastic uncertainty information on intervals for which the precise value can be queried by paying a cost. The goal is to devise an adaptive decision tree to find a correct solution to the problem in consideration…
Maximum surjective constraint satisfaction problems (Max-Sur-CSPs) are computational problems where we are given a set of variables denoting values from a finite domain B and a set of constraints on the variables. A solution to such a…
We study the online bin packing problem under two stochastic settings. In the bin packing problem, we are given n items with sizes in (0,1] and the goal is to pack them into the minimum number of unit-sized bins. First, we study bin packing…
We consider the Partition problem and propose a deterministic FPTAS (Fully Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme) that runs in $\widetilde{O}(n + 1/\varepsilon)$-time. This is the best possible (up to a polylogarithmic factor) assuming the…
We consider problems in which we are given a rooted tree as input, and must find a subtree with the same root, optimizing some objective function of the nodes in the subtree. When this function is the sum of constant node weights, the…
We study set selection problems where the weights are uncertain. Instead of its exact weight, only an uncertainty interval containing its true weight is available for each element. In some cases, some solutions are universally optimal;…
We consider the 0-1 Penalized Knapsack Problem (PKP). Each item has a profit, a weight and a penalty and the goal is to maximize the sum of the profits minus the greatest penalty value of the items included in a solution. We propose an…
In this paper, we consider a new problem of portfolio optimization using stochastic information. In a setting where there is some uncertainty, we ask how to best select $k$ potential solutions, with the goal of optimizing the value of the…
We study incremental knapsack problems with profits given by a special class of monotone submodular functions, that we dub all-or-nothing. We show that these problems are not harder to approximate than a less general class of modular…
In this paper, we obtain a number of new simple pseudo-polynomial time algorithms on the well-known knapsack problem, focusing on the running time dependency on the number of items $n$, the maximum item weight $w_\mathrm{max}$, and the…
Combinatorial optimization can be described as the problem of finding a feasible subset that maximizes a objective function. The paper discusses combinatorial optimization problems, where for each dimension the set of feasible subsets is…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…