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We consider online variations of the Pandora's box problem (Weitzman. 1979), a standard model for understanding issues related to the cost of acquiring information for decision-making. Our problem generalizes both the classic Pandora's box…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-01-31 Hossein Esfandiari , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Brendan Lucier , Michael Mitzenmacher

Pandora's Box is a fundamental stochastic optimization problem, where the decision-maker must find a good alternative while minimizing the search cost of exploring the value of each alternative. In the original formulation, it is assumed…

Model selection and order selection problems frequently arise in statistical practice. A popular approach to addressing these problems in the frequentist setting involves information criteria based on penalised maxima of log-likelihoods for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Hien Duy Nguyen , Mayetri Gupta , Jacob Westerhout , TrungTin Nguyen

Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-18 Xi Chen , Qihang Lin , Zizhuo Wang

We present an information-theoretic framework for solving global black-box optimization problems that also have black-box constraints. Of particular interest to us is to efficiently solve problems with decoupled constraints, in which…

In data-driven optimization, the sample performance of the obtained decision typically incurs an optimistic bias against the true performance, a phenomenon commonly known as the Optimizer's Curse and intimately related to overfitting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Garud Iyengar , Henry Lam , Tianyu Wang

We consider approximate Bayesian model choice for model selection problems that involve models whose Fisher-information matrices may fail to be invertible along other competing submodels. Such singular models do not obey the regularity…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-03-24 Mathias Drton , Martyn Plummer

We consider the dynamic classifier selection (DCS) problem: Given an ensemble of classifiers, we are to choose which classifier to use depending on the particular input vector that we get to classify. The problem is a special case of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-21 Meinolf Sellmann , Tapan Shah

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Aadirupa Saha , Shie Mannor

Performing model selection between Gibbs random fields is a very challenging task. Indeed, due to the Markovian dependence structure, the normalizing constant of the fields cannot be computed using standard analytical or numerical methods.…

Computation · Statistics 2019-09-04 Julien Stoehr , Jean-Michel Marin , Pierre Pudlo

In discrete-variable black-box optimization, the number of candidate solutions grows combinatorially, while each evaluation is often expensive. Therefore, it is important to identify promising solutions efficiently within a limited number…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-12 Reo Shikanai , Masayuki Ohzeki

This paper studies the online correlated selection (OCS) problem. It was introduced by Fahrbach, Huang, Tao, and Zadimoghaddam (2020) to obtain the first edge-weighted online bipartite matching algorithm that breaks the $0.5$ barrier.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Ruiquan Gao , Zhongtian He , Zhiyi Huang , Zipei Nie , Bijun Yuan , Yan Zhong

This paper considers the problem of approximating a density when it can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant at a limited number of points. We call this problem the Boltzmann approximation (BA) problem. The BA problem is ubiquitous in…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-08 Youngjun Choe , Yen-Chi Chen , Nick Terry

Subset selection with cost constraints aims to select a subset from a ground set to maximize a monotone objective function without exceeding a given budget, which has various applications such as influence maximization and maximum coverage.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Dan-Xuan Liu , Chao Qian

We study the problem of identifying correlations in multivariate data, under information constraints: Either on the amount of memory that can be used by the algorithm, or the amount of communication when the data is distributed across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Yuval Dagan , Ohad Shamir

We consider search problems with nonobligatory inspection and single-item or combinatorial selection. A decision maker is presented with a number of items, each of which contains an unknown price, and can pay an inspection cost to observe…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Ziv Scully , Laura Doval

We introduce Dynamic Information Sub-Selection (DISS), a novel framework of AI assistance designed to enhance the performance of black-box decision-makers by tailoring their information processing on a per-instance basis. Blackbox…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Hung-Tien Huang , Maxwell Lennon , Shreyas Bhat Brahmavar , Sean Sylvia , Junier B. Oliva

Dynamic feature selection, where we sequentially query features to make accurate predictions with a minimal budget, is a promising paradigm to reduce feature acquisition costs and provide transparency into a model's predictions. The problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Soham Gadgil , Ian Covert , Su-In Lee

Pandora's problem is a fundamental model in economics that studies optimal search strategies under costly inspection. In this paper we initiate the study of Pandora's problem with combinatorial costs, capturing many real-life scenarios…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Ben Berger , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Federico Fusco

Data-driven algorithmic matching systems promise to help human decision makers make better matching decisions in a wide variety of high-stakes application domains, such as healthcare and social service provision. However, existing systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Adrian Arnaiz-Rodriguez , Nina Corvelo Benz , Suhas Thejaswi , Nuria Oliver , Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez