Related papers: Statistical two-round search for one excellent ele…

We study Probabilistic Group Testing of a set of N items each of which is defective with probability p. We focus on the double limit of small defect probability, p<<1, and large number of variables, N>>1, taking either p->0 after…

In group testing, the goal is to identify a subset of defective items within a larger set of items based on tests whose outcomes indicate whether at least one defective item is present. This problem is relevant in areas such as medical…

We consider the problem of search of an unstructured list for a marked element, when one is given advice as to where this element might be located, in the form of a probability distribution. The goal is to minimise the expected number of…

The compact genetic algorithm is an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm for binary optimisation problems. Unlike the standard Genetic Algorithm, no cross-over or mutation is involved. Instead, the compact Genetic Algorithm uses a virtual…

Let $(Y,X_1,...,X_m)$ be a random vector. It is desired to predict $Y$ based on $(X_1,...,X_m)$. Examples of prediction methods are regression, classification using logistic regression or separating hyperplanes, and so on. We consider the…

We consider the sorted top-$k$ problem whose goal is to recover the top-$k$ items with the correct order out of $n$ items using pairwise comparisons. In many applications, multiple rounds of interaction can be costly. We restrict our…

Given two sets A and B and two oracles O(A) and O(B) that can identify the elements of these sets respectively, the goal is to find an element common to both sets using minimum number of oracle queries. Each application of either O(A) or…

We pose a fundamental question in computational learning theory: can we efficiently test whether a training set satisfies the assumptions of a given noise model? This question has remained unaddressed despite decades of research on learning…

We consider a combinatorial question about searching for an unknown ideal $\mu$ within a known poset $\lambda$. Elements of $\lambda$ may be queried for membership in $\mu$, but at most $k$ positive query results are permitted. The goal is…

The group testing problem consists of determining a sparse subset of defective items from within a larger set of items via a series of tests, where each test outcome indicates whether at least one defective item is included in the test. We…

The vast majority of theoretical results in machine learning and statistics assume that the available training data is a reasonably reliable reflection of the phenomena to be learned or estimated. Similarly, the majority of machine learning…

Sorting is the task of ordering $n$ elements using pairwise comparisons. It is well known that $m=\Theta(n\log n)$ comparisons are both necessary and sufficient when the outcomes of the comparisons are observed with no noise. In this paper,…

Frequently one has to search within a finite population for a single particular individual or item with a rare characteristic. Whether an item possesses the characteristic can only be determined by close inspection. The availability of…

We consider the problem of selecting a subset of alternatives given noisy evaluations of the relative strength of different alternatives. We wish to select a k-subset (for a given k) that provides a maximum likelihood estimate for one of…

Let $X$ be a set of items of size $n$ , which may contain some defective items denoted by $I$, where $I \subseteq X$. In group testing, a {\it test} refers to a subset of items $Q \subset X$. The test outcome is $1$ (positive) if $Q$…

We consider the quantum complexities of the following three problems: searching an ordered list, sorting an un-ordered list, and deciding whether the numbers in a list are all distinct. Letting N be the number of elements in the input list,…

We propose a new analysis framework for clustering $M$ items into an unknown number of $K$ distinct groups using noisy and actively collected responses. At each time step, an agent is allowed to query pairs of items and observe bandit…

In this paper, we derive mutual information based upper and lower bounds on the number of nonadaptive group tests required to identify a given number of "non defective" items from a large population containing a small number of "defective"…

We use a Bayesian approach to optimally solve problems in noisy binary search. We deal with two variants: 1. Each comparison can be erroneous with some probability $1 - p$. 2. At each stage $k$ comparisons can be performed in parallel and a…

Let $P = \{p(i)\}$ be a measure of strictly positive probabilities on the set of nonnegative integers. Although the countable number of inputs prevents usage of the Huffman algorithm, there are nontrivial $P$ for which known methods find a…