Related papers: Fast Enumeration of Combinatorial Objects
The aim of this thesis is to determine classes of NP relations for which random generation and approximate counting problems admit an efficient solution. Since efficient rank implies efficient random generation, we first investigate some…
This paper examines the problem of ranking a collection of objects using pairwise comparisons (rankings of two objects). In general, the ranking of $n$ objects can be identified by standard sorting methods using $n log_2 n$ pairwise…
Occam's Razor tells us to pick the simplest model that fits our observations. In order to make sense of his process mathematically, we interpret it in the context of posets of functions. Our approach leads to some unusual new combinatorial…
We consider the classic problem of establishing a statistical ranking of a set of n items given a set of inconsistent and incomplete pairwise comparisons between such items. Instantiations of this problem occur in numerous applications in…
The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of machine learning and pattern recognition. Through these advancements, variable ranking has emerged as an active and growing research area and it is now beginning to be…
In the unidimensional unfolding model, given m objects in general position there arise 1+m(m-1)/2 rankings. The set of rankings is called the ranking pattern of the m given objects. By changing these m objects, we can generate various…
Given a combinatorial search problem, it may be highly useful to enumerate its (all) solutions besides just finding one solution, or showing that none exists. The same can be stated about optimal solutions if an objective function is…
Comparing the top $k$ elements between two or more ranked results is a common task in many contexts and settings. A few measures have been proposed to compare top $k$ lists with attractive mathematical properties, but they face a number of…
We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…
Ranking objects is a simple and natural procedure for organizing data. It is often performed by assigning a quality score to each object according to its relevance to the problem at hand. Ranking is widely used for object selection, when…
We introduce the strongly NP-complete pagination problem, an extension of BIN PACKING where packing together two items may make them occupy less volume than the sum of their individual sizes. To achieve this property, an item is defined as…
Combinatorics, like computer science, often has to deal with large objects of unspecified (or unusable) structure. One powerful way to deal with such an arbitrary object is to decompose it into more usable components. In particular, it has…
Rank aggregation aims to combine the preference rankings of a number of alternatives from different voters into a single consensus ranking. As a useful model for a variety of practical applications, however, it is a computationally…
Evaluating performance across optimization algorithms on many problems presents a complex challenge due to the diversity of numerical scales involved. Traditional data processing methods, such as hypothesis testing and Bayesian inference,…
Ranking is one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning with applications in many branches of computer science such as: information retrieval systems, recommendation systems, machine translation and computational biology.…
A top-list is a possibly incomplete ranking of elements: only a subset of the elements are ranked, with all unranked elements tied for last. Top-list aggregation, a generalization of the well-known rank aggregation problem, takes as input a…
We investigate crowdsourcing algorithms for finding the top-quality item within a large collection of objects with unknown intrinsic quality values. This is an important problem with many relevant applications, for example in networked…
This thesis deals with the enumerative study of combinatorial maps, and its application to the enumeration of other combinatorial objects. Combinatorial maps, or simply maps, form a rich combinatorial model. They have an intuitive and…
Many proofs in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science are based on the probabilistic method. To prove the existence of a good object, we pick a random object and show that it is bad with low probability. This method is…
The random cost problem is the problem of finding the minimum in an exponentially long list of random numbers. By definition, this problem cannot be solved faster than by exhaustive search. It is shown that a classical NP-hard optimization…