Related papers: Avoiding patterns and making the best choice
Algorithms with predictions is a recent framework for decision-making under uncertainty that leverages the power of machine-learned predictions without making any assumption about their quality. The goal in this framework is for algorithms…
In the classical secretary problem, one attempts to find the maximum of an unknown and unlearnable distribution through sequential search. In many real-world searches, however, distributions are not entirely unknown and can be learned…
We study a twist on the classic secretary problem, which we term the secretary ranking problem: elements from an ordered set arrive in random order and instead of picking the maximum element, the algorithm is asked to assign a rank, or…
In the secretary problem we are faced with an online sequence of elements with values. Upon seeing an element we have to make an irrevocable take-it-or-leave-it decision. The goal is to maximize the probability of picking the element of…
We revisit the problem of selecting an item from $n$ choices that appear before us in random sequential order so as to minimize the expected rank of the item selected. In particular, we examine the stopping rule where we reject the first…
Permutation pattern-avoidance is a central concept of both enumerative and extremal combinatorics. In this paper we study the effect of permutation pattern-avoidance on the complexity of optimization problems. In the context of the dynamic…
We study a generalization of the secretary problem, where decisions do not have to be made immediately upon candidates' arrivals. After arriving, each candidate stays in the system for some (random) amount of time and then leaves, whereupon…
A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the b best out of a group of n differently ranked persons who are presented one by one in a random order. It is assumed that b is a…
The secretary problem is probably the purest model of decision making under uncertainty. In this paper we ask which advice can we give the algorithm to improve its success probability? We propose a general model that unifies a broad range…
In the subject of optimal stopping, the classical secretary problem is concerned with optimally selecting the best of $n$ candidates when their relative ranks are observed sequentially. This problem has been extended to optimally selecting…
In this paper, we investigate two variants of the secretary problem. In these variants, we are presented with a sequence of numbers $X_i$ that come from distributions $\mathcal{D}_i$, and that arrive in either random or adversarial order.…
In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We…
We study a game between $N$ job applicants who incur a cost $c$ (relative to the job value) to reveal their type during interviews and an administrator who seeks to maximize the probability of hiring the best. We define a full learning…
We study a learning-augmented variant of the secretary problem, recently introduced by Fujii and Yoshida (2023), in which the decision-maker has access to machine-learned predictions of candidate values. The central challenge is to balance…
We extend the standard online worst-case model to accommodate past experience which is available to the online player in many practical scenarios. We do this by revealing a random sample of the adversarial input to the online player ahead…
We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this…
Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…
In the Secretary Problem, one has to hire the best among n candidates. The candidates are interviewed, one at a time, at a random order, and one has to decide on the spot, whether to hire a candidate or continue interviewing. It is well…
Consider a hiring process with candidates coming from different universities. It is easy to order candidates with the same background, yet it can be challenging to compare them otherwise. The latter case requires additional costly…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…