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We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Reza Alijani , Siddhartha Banerjee , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Pranav Nuti , Peter Westbrook

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

The (Non-Preemptive) Throughput Maximization problem is a natural and fundamental scheduling problem. We are given $n$ jobs, where each job $j$ is characterized by a processing time and a time window, contained in a global interval $[0,T)$,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Alexander Armbruster , Fabrizio Grandoni , Antoine Tinguely , Andreas Wiese

Estimating the density of a distribution from its samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. Hypothesis selection addresses the setting where, in addition to a sample set, we are given $n$ candidate distributions -- referred to as…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Zhan Shi , Ria Stevens , Vincent X. Wang

A step-search sequential quadratic programming method is proposed for solving nonlinear equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. It is assumed that constraint function values and derivatives are available, but only stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-08 Albert S. Berahas , Miaolan Xie , Baoyu Zhou

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

Over the past two decades, significant strides have been made in stochastic problems such as revenue-optimal auction design and prophet inequalities, traditionally modeled with $n$ independent random variables to represent the values of $n$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Vasilis Livanos , Kalen Patton , Sahil Singla

Prophet inequalities are fundamental optimal stopping problems, where a decision-maker observes sequentially items with values sampled independently from known distributions, and must decide at each new observation to either stop and gain…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Ziyad Benomar , Dorian Baudry , Vianney Perchet

We revisit three fundamental problems in algorithms under uncertainty: the Secretary Problem, Prophet Inequality, and Stochastic Probing, each subject to general downward-closed constraints. When elements have binary values, all three…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aviad Rubinstein , Sahil Singla

The classical approach to system identification is based on stochastic assumptions about the measurement error, and provides estimates that have random nature. Worst-case identification, on the other hand, only assumes the knowledge of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2013-06-07 Fabrizio Dabbene , Mario Sznaier , Roberto Tempo

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

We consider descending price auctions for selling $m$ units of a good to unit demand i.i.d. buyers where there is an exogenous bound of $k$ on the number of price levels the auction clock can take. The auctioneer's problem is to choose…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Saeed Alaei , Ali Makhdoumi , Azarakhsh Malekian , Rad Niazadeh

The main focus of this paper is a pair of new approximation algorithms for certain integer programs. First, for covering integer programs {min cx: Ax >= b, 0 <= x <= d} where A has at most k nonzeroes per row, we give a k-approximation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-02-09 David Pritchard , Deeparnab Chakrabarty

This paper studies a nonlinear filtering problem over an infinite time interval. The signal to be estimated is driven by a stochastic partial differential equation involves unknown parameters. Based on discrete observation, strongly…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-07-12 Qizhu Liang , Jie Xiong , Xingqiu Zhao

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested experimentally for solving stochastic optimization problems in which the decision variables are constrained to satisfy equations defined by deterministic, smooth, and nonlinear functions. It is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-09 Frank E. Curtis , Daniel P. Robinson , Baoyu Zhou

We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-04-23 Boris Lesner , Bruno Scherrer

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…

Chance constrained program where one seeks to minimize an objective over decisions which satisfy randomly disturbed constraints with a given probability is computationally intractable. This paper proposes an approximate approach to address…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-23 Xun Shen , Jiancang Zhuang , Xingguo Zhang

Linear fixed point equations in Hilbert spaces arise in a variety of settings, including reinforcement learning, and computational methods for solving differential and integral equations. We study methods that use a collection of random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Wenlong Mou , Ashwin Pananjady , Martin J. Wainwright