Related papers: Secretary Problems: The Power of a Single Sample
We consider a simple optimal probabilistic problem solving strategy that searches through potential solution candidates in a specific order. We are interested in what impact has interchanging the order of two solution candidates with…
Scenario decision making offers a flexible way of making decision in an uncertain environment while obtaining probabilistic guarantees on the risk of failure of the decision. The idea of this approach is to draw samples of the uncertainty…
This paper considers properties of an optimization based sampler for targeting the posterior distribution when the likelihood is intractable and auxiliary statistics are used to summarize information in the data. Our reverse sampler…
Social and real-world considerations such as robustness, fairness, social welfare and multi-agent tradeoffs have given rise to multi-distribution learning paradigms, such as collaborative learning, group distributionally robust…
We consider a worst-case asymmetric distributed source coding problem where an information sink communicates with $N$ correlated information sources to gather their data. A data-vector $\bar{x} = (x_1, ..., x_N) \sim {\mathcal P}$ is…
We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…
Interest in the random-order model (ROM) leads us to initiate a study of utilizing random-order arrivals to extract random bits with the goal of derandomizing algorithms. Besides producing simple algorithms, simulating random bits through…
We show that the matroid secretary problem is equivalent to correlated contention resolution in the online random-order model. Specifically, the matroid secretary conjecture is true if and only if every matroid admits an online random-order…
Matching is one of the most fundamental and broadly applicable problems across many domains. In these diverse real-world applications, there is often a degree of uncertainty in the input which has led to the study of stochastic matching…
Statistical query (SQ) algorithms are algorithms that have access to an {\em SQ oracle} for the input distribution $D$ instead of i.i.d.~ samples from $D$. Given a query function $\phi:X \rightarrow [-1,1]$, the oracle returns an estimate…
In the Sequential Selection Problem (SSP), immediate and irrevocable decisions need to be made as candidates randomly arrive for a job interview. Standard SSP variants, such as the well-known secretary problem, begin with an empty selection…
The literature on "mechanism design from samples," which has flourished in recent years at the interface of economics and computer science, offers a bridge between the classic computer-science approach of worst-case analysis (corresponding…
We study matroid prophet inequalities when distributions are unknown and accessible only through samples. While single-sample prophet inequalities for special matroids are known, no constant-factor competitive algorithm with even a…
We study maximum selection and sorting of $n$ numbers using pairwise comparators that output the larger of their two inputs if the inputs are more than a given threshold apart, and output an adversarially-chosen input otherwise. We consider…
We study a distributed sampling problem where a set of processors want to output (approximately) independent and identically distributed samples from a joint distribution with the help of a common message from a coordinator. Each processor…
We study generalizations of the "Prophet Inequality" and "Secretary Problem", where the algorithm is restricted to an arbitrary downward-closed set system. For {0,1}-values, we give O(log n)-competitive algorithms for both problems. This is…
Many algorithms have been developed to estimate probability distributions subject to differential privacy (DP): such an algorithm takes as input independent samples from a distribution and estimates the density function in a way that is…
Let $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ be independent identically distributed random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We consider upper bounds on $\max_x \mathbb{P}(a_1X_1+\cdots+a_nX_n=x)$ under various restrictions on $X_i$ and the weights $a_i$. When…
In a delegation problem, a principal P with commitment power tries to pick one out of $n$ options. Each option is drawn independently from a known distribution. Instead of inspecting the options herself, P delegates the information…
In this paper a new decision theoretic sampling plan (DSP) is proposed for Type-I censored exponential distribution. The proposed DSP is based on a new estimator of the expected lifetime of an exponential distribution which always exists,…