Related papers: Online Pen Testing
One of the most fundamental problems in distribution testing is the identity testing problem: given samples $x_1,\ldots,x_s$, the goal is to determine whether the samples are drawn from a target distribution $\mathcal{D}$. When…
The blessing of ubiquitous data also comes with a curse: the communication, storage, and labeling of massive, mostly redundant datasets. We seek to solve this problem at its core, collecting only valuable data and throwing out the rest via…
We study an online resource allocation problem under uncertainty about demand and about the reward of each type of demand (agents) for the resource. Even though dealing with demand uncertainty in resource allocation problems has been the…
In this paper we consider two variants of the Secretary problem: The Best-or-Worst and the Postdoc problems. We extend previous work by considering that the number of objects is not known and follows either a discrete Uniform distribution…
We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing domains with $n$ candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order. The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value. In the…
There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…
Given a sequence of independent random variables with a common continuous distribution, we consider the online decision problem where one seeks to minimize the expected value of the time that is needed to complete the selection of a…
We present a number of positive and negative results for variants of the matroid secretary problem. Most notably, we design a constant-factor competitive algorithm for the "random assignment" model where the weights are assigned randomly to…
We introduce the \textit{prophet inequality with uncertain acceptance} model, in which a decision maker sequentially observes a sequence of independent options, each characterized by a value $x_i$ and an acceptance probability $p_i$, both…
In the past decade, the technology industry has adopted online randomized controlled experiments (a.k.a. A/B testing) to guide product development and make business decisions. In practice, A/B tests are often implemented with increasing…
A central object in optimal stopping theory is the single-choice prophet inequality for independent, identically distributed random variables: Given a sequence of random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ drawn independently from a distribution $F$,…
We study various generalizations of the secretary problem with submodular objective functions. Generally, a set of requests is revealed step-by-step to an algorithm in random order. For each request, one option has to be selected so as to…
We study the task of selecting $k$ nodes, in a social network of size $n$, to seed a diffusion with maximum expected spread size, under the independent cascade model with cascade probability $p$. Most of the previous work on this problem…
We study single-sample prophet inequalities (SSPIs), i.e., prophet inequalities where only a single sample from each prior distribution is available. Besides a direct, and optimal, SSPI for the basic single choice problem [Rubinstein et…
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…
We study the classic single-choice prophet secretary problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\epsilon)$-competition complexity for different classes of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…
The classical analysis of online algorithms, due to its worst-case nature, can be quite pessimistic when the input instance at hand is far from worst-case. Often this is not an issue with machine learning approaches, which shine in…
Suppose we are given integer $k \leq n$ and $n$ boxes labeled $1,\ldots, n$ by an adversary, each containing a number chosen from an unknown distribution. We have to choose an order to sequentially open these boxes, and each time we open…
The $k$-of-$n$ testing problem involves performing $n$ independent tests sequentially, in order to determine whether/not at least $k$ tests pass. The objective is to minimize the expected cost of testing. This is a fundamental and…
Consider the problem: we are given $n$ boxes, labeled $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ by an adversary, each containing a single number chosen from an unknown distribution; these $n$ distributions are not necessarily identical. We are also given an…