Related papers: The Careless Coupon Collector's Problem

We consider a multi-stage distributed detection scenario, where $n$ sensors and a fusion center (FC) are deployed to accomplish a binary hypothesis test. At each time stage, local sensors generate binary messages, assumed to be spatially…

The change-making problem asks: given a positive integer $v$ and a collection $C$ of integer coin values $c_1=1<c_2< c_3< \cdots< c_n$, what is the minimum number of coins needed to represent $v$ with coin values from $C$? For some coin…

We study nonstationary Online Linear Programming (OLP), where $n$ orders arrive sequentially with reward-resource consumption pairs that form a sequence of independent, but not necessarily identically distributed, random vectors. At the…

Recent work on deep clustering has found new promising methods also for constrained clustering problems. Their typically pairwise constraints often can be used to guide the partitioning of the data. Many problems however, feature…

Lotteries are a prevalent form of gambling between a seller and buyers. Designing a lottery requires a model of how buyers make decisions when confronted with uncertain outcomes. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is a descriptive model that…

Weak topic correlation across document collections with different numbers of topics in individual collections presents challenges for existing cross-collection topic models. This paper introduces two probabilistic topic models, Correlated…

This paper investigates the combination of model predictive control (MPC) concepts and posterior sampling techniques and proposes a simple constraint tightening technique to introduce cautiousness during explorative learning episodes. The…

Random selection, leader election, and collective coin flipping are fundamental tasks in fault-tolerant distributed computing. We study these problems in the full-information model where despite decades of study, key gaps remain in our…

Conformal Prediction (CP) stands out as a robust framework for uncertainty quantification, which is crucial for ensuring the reliability of predictions. However, common CP methods heavily rely on data exchangeability, a condition often…

The Container Relocation Problem (CRP) is concerned with finding a sequence of moves of containers that minimizes the number of relocations needed to retrieve all containers respecting a given order of retrieval. While the problem is known…

We study robust and efficient distributed algorithms for searching, storing, and maintaining data in dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. P2P networks are highly dynamic networks that experience heavy node churn (i.e., nodes join and leave…

We introduce a method based on Conformal Prediction (CP) to quantify the uncertainty of full ranking algorithms. We focus on a specific scenario where $n+m$ items are to be ranked by some ``black box'' algorithm. It is assumed that the…

We propose a novel non-linear extension to the Orienteering Problem (OP), called the Correlated Orienteering Problem (COP). We use COP to model the planning of informative tours for the persistent monitoring of a spatiotemporal field with…

Verifying uniform conditions over continuous spaces through random sampling is fundamental in machine learning and control theory, yet classical coverage analyses often yield conservative bounds, particularly at small failure probabilities.…

We introduce a new notion of information complexity for multi-pass streaming problems and use it to resolve several important questions in data streams. In the coin problem, one sees a stream of $n$ i.i.d. uniform bits and one would like to…

Due to the recent increase in interest in Financial Technology (FinTech), applications like credit default prediction (CDP) are gaining significant industrial and academic attention. In this regard, CDP plays a crucial role in assessing the…

Data of the form of event times arise in various applications. A simple model for such data is a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) which is specified by a rate function that depends on time. We consider the problem of having access to…

Online knapsack problem is considered, where items arrive in a sequential fashion that have two attributes; value and weight. Each arriving item has to be accepted or rejected on its arrival irrevocably. The objective is to maximize the sum…

The Change-Making Problem is to represent a given value with the fewest coins under a given coin system. As a variation of the knapsack problem, it is known to be NP-hard. Nevertheless, in most real money systems, the greedy algorithm…

The problem of scheduling tasks on $p$ processors so that no task ever gets too far behind is often described as a game with cups and water. In the $p$-processor cup game on $n$ cups, there are two players, a filler and an emptier, that…