Related papers: A Simple Balanced Search Tree with No Balance Crit…
We analyze parallel algorithms in the context of exhaustive search over totally ordered sets. Imagine an infinite list of "boxes", with a "treasure" hidden in one of them, where the boxes' order reflects the importance of finding the…
The easy-hard-easy pattern in the difficulty of combinatorial search problems as constraints are added has been explained as due to a competition between the decrease in number of solutions and increased pruning. We test the generality of…
We present a novel method for approximately equilibrating a matrix $A \in {\bf R}^{m \times n}$ using only multiplication by $A$ and $A^T$. Our method is based on convex optimization and projected stochastic gradient descent, using an…
We analyze a tree search problem with an underlying Markov decision process, in which the goal is to identify the best action at the root that achieves the highest cumulative reward. We present a new tree policy that optimally allocates a…
This paper describes a new and purely functional implementation technique of binary heaps. A binary heap is a tree-based data structure that implements priority queue operations (insert, remove, minimum/maximum) and guarantees at worst…
In this paper, we propose a compositional nonparametric method in which a model is expressed as a labeled binary tree of $2k+1$ nodes, where each node is either a summation, a multiplication, or the application of one of the $q$ basis…
The condition number of a diagonally scaled matrix, for appropriately chosen scaling matrices, is often less than that of the original. Equilibration scales a matrix so that the scaled matrix's row and column norms are equal. Scaling can be…
In observational causal inference, in order to emulate a randomized experiment, weights are used to render treatments independent of observed covariates. This property is known as balance; in its absence, estimated causal effects may be…
We define a new balance index for rooted phylogenetic trees based on the symmetry of the evolutive history of every set of 4 leaves. This index makes sense for multifurcating trees and it can be computed in time linear in the number of…
Despite the many recent practical and theoretical breakthroughs in computational game theory, equilibrium finding in extensive-form team games remains a significant challenge. While NP-hard in the worst case, there are provably efficient…
A large amount of research effort has been dedicated to adapting boosting for imbalanced classification. However, boosting methods are yet to be satisfactorily immune to class imbalance, especially for multi-class problems. This is because…
Binary search finds a given element in a sorted array with an optimal number of $\log n$ queries. However, binary search fails even when the array is only slightly disordered or access to its elements is subject to errors. We study the…
We present a new approach to the global fairness verification of tree-based classifiers. Given a tree-based classifier and a set of sensitive features potentially leading to discrimination, our analysis synthesizes sufficient conditions for…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…
Many applications require recovering a ground truth low-rank matrix from noisy observations of the entries, which in practice is typically formulated as a weighted low-rank approximation problem and solved by non-convex optimization…
The decision tree is one of the most fundamental programming abstractions. A commonly used type of decision tree is the alphabetic binary tree, which uses (without loss of generality) ``less than'' versus ''greater than or equal to'' tests…
Line search (or backtracking) procedures have been widely employed into first-order methods for solving convex optimization problems, especially those with unknown problem parameters (e.g., Lipschitz constant). In this paper, we show that…
In this paper, we introduce a new method for querying triadic concepts through partial or complete matching of triples using an inverted index, to retrieve already computed triadic concepts that contain a set of terms in their extent,…
We re-examine previous constructions of infinite binary words containing few distinct squares with the goal of finding the "simplest", in a certain sense. We exhibit several new constructions. Rather than using tedious case-based arguments…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…