Related papers: On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Greedy Al…
Weak submodularity is a natural relaxation of the diminishing return property, which is equivalent to submodularity. Weak submodularity has been used to show that many (monotone) functions that arise in practice can be efficiently maximized…
A deterministic approximation algorithm is presented for the maximization of non-monotone submodular functions over a ground set of size $n$ subject to cardinality constraint $k$; the algorithm is based upon the idea of interlacing two…
The maximization of submodular functions is an NP-Hard problem for certain subclasses of functions, for which a simple greedy algorithm has been shown to guarantee a solution whose quality is within 1/2 of the optimal. When this algorithm…
Submodular functions -- functions exhibiting diminishing returns -- are central to machine learning. When the objective is monotone and non-negative, the greedy algorithm achieves a tight $63\%$ approximation. But many practical objectives…
It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show - arguably, surprisingly - that invoking the…
A $k$-submodular function is a generalization of the submodular set function. Many practical applications can be modeled as maximizing a $k$-submodular function, such as multi-cooperative games, sensor placement with $k$ type sensors,…
We study submodular maximization problems with matroid constraints, in particular, problems where the objective can be expressed via compositions of analytic and multilinear functions. We show that for functions of this form, the so-called…
In the classical selection problem, the input consists of a collection of elements and the goal is to pick a subset of elements from the collection such that some objective function $f$ is maximized. This problem has been studied…
The submodular maximization problem is widely applicable in many engineering problems where objectives exhibit diminishing returns. While this problem is known to be NP-hard for certain subclasses of objective functions, there is a greedy…
Many problems in signal processing and machine learning can be formalized as weak submodular optimization tasks. For such problems, a simple greedy algorithm (\textsc{Greedy}) is guaranteed to find a solution achieving the objective with a…
Monotone submodular maximization with a knapsack constraint is NP-hard. Various approximation algorithms have been devised to address this optimization problem. In this paper, we revisit the widely known modified greedy algorithm. First, we…
The problem of objectively choosing a string of actions to optimize an objective function that is string submodular has been considered in [1]. There it is shown that the greedy strategy, consisting of a string of actions that only locally…
A $k$-submodular function naturally generalizes submodular functions by taking as input $k$ disjoint subsets, rather than a single subset. Unlike standard submodular maximization, which only requires selecting elements for the solution,…
We study the problem of selecting a subset of k random variables from a large set, in order to obtain the best linear prediction of another variable of interest. This problem can be viewed in the context of both feature selection and sparse…
Subset selection, which aims to select a subset from a ground set to maximize some objective function, arises in various applications such as influence maximization and sensor placement. In real-world scenarios, however, one often needs to…
We study the problem of maximizing a submodular function, subject to a cardinality constraint, with a set of agents communicating over a connected graph. We propose a distributed greedy algorithm that allows all the agents to converge to a…
We present an optimal, combinatorial 1-1/e approximation algorithm for monotone submodular optimization over a matroid constraint. Compared to the continuous greedy algorithm (Calinescu, Chekuri, Pal and Vondrak, 2008), our algorithm is…
Submodular functions are well-studied in combinatorial optimization, game theory and economics. The natural diminishing returns property makes them suitable for many applications. We study an extension of monotone submodular functions,…
Submodularity is a key property in discrete optimization. Submodularity has been widely used for analyzing the greedy algorithm to give performance bounds and providing insight into the construction of valid inequalities for mixed-integer…
We provide theoretical bounds on the worst case performance of the greedy algorithm in seeking to maximize a normalized, monotone, but not necessarily submodular objective function under a simple partition matroid constraint. We also…