Related papers: An Optimal Selection Problem Associated with the P…
The k-d tree was one of the first spatial data structures proposed for nearest neighbor search. Its efficacy is diminished in high-dimensional spaces, but several variants, with randomization and overlapping cells, have proved to be…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
This thesis is divided in two parts. The first presents an overview of known results in statistical mechanics of disordered systems and its approach to random combinatorial optimization problems. The second part is a discussion of two…
The allocation problem for a $d$-dimensional Poisson point process is to find a way to partition the space to parts of equal size, and to assign the parts to the configuration points in a measurable, "deterministic" (equivariant) way. The…
Consider a discrete-time optimal selection problem where one observes a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials and receives a nonnegative reward upon stopping on a success. The aim is to find a single-choice strategy that maximises the…
The k-means objective is arguably the most widely-used cost function for modeling clustering tasks in a metric space. In practice and historically, k-means is thought of in a continuous setting, namely where the centers can be located…
This paper develops a framework for the design of scoring rules to optimally incentivize an agent to exert a multi-dimensional effort. This framework is a generalization to strategic agents of the classical knapsack problem (cf. Briest,…
Theory and application of stochastic approximation (SA) have become increasingly relevant due in part to applications in optimization and reinforcement learning. This paper takes a new look at SA with constant step-size $\alpha>0$, defined…
We consider the task of monitoring spatiotemporal phenomena in real-time by deploying limited sampling resources at locations of interest irrevocably and without knowledge of future observations. This task can be modeled as an instance of…
We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample…
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…
The classical secretary problem investigates the question of how to hire the best secretary from $n$ candidates who come in a uniformly random order. In this work we investigate a parallel generalizations of this problem introduced by…
This work presents an empirical analysis of exact algorithms for the unbounded knapsack problem, which includes seven algorithms from the literature, two commercial solvers, and more than ten thousand instances. The terminating step-off, a…
BayesianOptimization(BO) is a sample-efficient black-box optimizer, and extensive methods have been proposed to build the absolute function response of the black-box function through a probabilistic surrogate model, including…
There has been a long-standing interest in computing diverse solutions to optimization problems. Motivated by reallocation of governmental institutions in Sweden, in 1995 J. Krarup posed the problem of finding $k$ edge-disjoint Hamiltonian…
The decision problem of perfect matchings in uniform hypergraphs is famously an NP-complete problem. It has been shown by Keevash--Knox--Mycroft [STOC, 2013] that for every $\varepsilon>0$, such decision problem restricted to $k$-uniform…
We introduce a novel strategy to address the issue of demand estimation in single-item single-period stochastic inventory optimisation problems. Our strategy analytically combines confidence interval analysis and inventory optimisation. We…
This paper proposes to develop a new variant of the two-time-scale stochastic approximation to find the roots of two coupled nonlinear operators, assuming only noisy samples of these operators can be observed. Our key idea is to leverage…
We study pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for the fundamental \emph{0-1 Knapsack} problem. In terms of $n$ and $w_{\max}$, previous algorithms for 0-1 Knapsack have cubic time complexities: $O(n^2w_{\max})$ (Bellman 1957), $O(nw_{\max}^2)$…
We consider a version of the continuum armed bandit where an action induces a filtered realisation of a non-homogeneous Poisson process. Point data in the filtered sample are then revealed to the decision-maker, whose reward is the total…