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We introduce a model of competing agents in a prophet setting, where rewards arrive online, and decisions are made immediately and irrevocably. The rewards are unknown from the outset, but they are drawn from a known probability…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Ron Kupfer

This paper considers a finite horizon optimal stopping problem for a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables, where the objective is to design stopping rules that attempt to select the random variable with the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-20 Alexander Goldenshluger , Yaakov Malinovsky , Assaf Zeevi

Choosing a decision threshold is one of the challenging job in any classification tasks. How much the model is accurate, if the deciding boundary is not picked up carefully, its entire performance would go in vain. On the other hand, for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Bharat Bohara

In the Prophet Secretary problem, samples from a known set of probability distributions arrive one by one in a uniformly random order, and an algorithm must irrevocably pick one of the samples as soon as it arrives. The goal is to maximize…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Yossi Azar , Ashish Chiplunkar , Haim Kaplan

Many online problems are studied in stochastic settings for which inputs are samples from a known distribution, given in advance, or from an unknown distribution. Such distributions model both beyond-worst-case inputs and, when given,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Gregory Kehne , Thomas Kesselheim

In the classical prophet inequality settings, a gambler is given a sequence of $n$ random variables $X_1, \dots, X_n$, taken from known distributions, observes their values in this (potentially adversarial) order, and select one of them,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Sariel Har-Peled , Elfarouk Harb , Vasilis Livanos

We consider the prophet inequality problem for (not necessarily bipartite) matching problems with independent edge values, under both edge arrivals and vertex arrivals. We show constant-factor prophet inequalities for the case where the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco , Philip Lazos , Stefano Leonardi , Rebecca Reiffenhäuser

The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Jack Wang

We introduce a new measure for the performance of online algorithms in Bayesian settings, where the input is drawn from a known prior, but the realizations are revealed one-by-one in an online fashion. Our new measure is called…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Nick Gravin , Zhihao Gavin Tang

In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Mohit Singh , Alejandro Toriello

The prophet inequality is one of the cornerstone problems in optimal stopping theory and has become a crucial tool for designing sequential algorithms in Bayesian settings. In the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Johannes Brustle , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Victor Verdugo

Suppose (standardized) measurements or statistics are monitored to raise an alarm when a threshold is exceeded. Often, the underlying population is heterogenous with respect to important discrete variables and thus samples may consist of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-10 Ansgar Steland

Prophet inequalities are performance guarantees for online algorithms (a.k.a. stopping rules) solving the following "hiring problem": a decision maker sequentially inspects candidates whose values are independent random numbers and is asked…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Makis Arsenis , Robert Kleinberg

We initiate the study of the prophet inequality problem through the resource augmentation framework in scenarios when the values of the rewards are correlated. Our goal is to determine the number of additional rewards an online algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Tomer Ezra , Tamar Garbuz

Equivalence testing, a fundamental problem in the field of distribution testing, seeks to infer if two unknown distributions on $[n]$ are the same or far apart in the total variation distance. Conditional sampling has emerged as a powerful…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Diptarka Chakraborty , Sourav Chakraborty , Gunjan Kumar , Kuldeep S. Meel

We present a general framework for stochastic online maximization problems with combinatorial feasibility constraints. The framework establishes prophet inequalities by constructing price-based online approximation algorithms, a natural…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim , Brendan Lucier

Sampling is a fundamental problem in computer science and statistics. However, for a given task and stream, it is often not possible to choose good sampling probabilities in advance. We derive a general framework for adaptively changing the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Daniel Ting

In the fixed budget thresholding bandit problem, an algorithm sequentially allocates a budgeted number of samples to different distributions. It then predicts whether the mean of each distribution is larger or lower than a given threshold.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Reda Ouhamma , Rémy Degenne , Pierre Gaillard , Vianney Perchet

We study the single-choice Prophet Inequality problem when the gambler is given access to samples. We show that the optimal competitive ratio of $1/2$ can be achieved with a single sample from each distribution. When the distributions are…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aviad Rubinstein , Jack Z. Wang , S. Matthew Weinberg

Most of the literature on online algorithms in revenue management focuses on settings with irrevocable decisions, where once a decision is made upon the arrival of a new input, it cannot be canceled later. Motivated by modern applications…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Farbod Ekbatani , Rad Niazadeh , Pranav Nuti , Jan Vondrak