相关论文: A Simple Search Problem

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…

Pandora's Box is a central problem in decision making under uncertainty that can model various real life scenarios. In this problem we are given $n$ boxes, each with a fixed opening cost, and an unknown value drawn from a known…

We study a resource allocation setting where $m$ discrete items are to be divided among $n$ agents with additive utilities, and the agents' utilities for individual items are drawn at random from a probability distribution. Since common…

Consider the problem: we are given $n$ boxes, labeled $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ by an adversary, each containing a single number chosen from an unknown distribution; these $n$ distributions are not necessarily identical. We are also given an…

This work considers the problem of the noisy binary search in a sorted array. The noise is modeled by a parameter $p$ that dictates that a comparison can be incorrect with probability $p$, independently of other queries. We state two types…

We study problems with stochastic uncertainty information on intervals for which the precise value can be queried by paying a cost. The goal is to devise an adaptive decision tree to find a correct solution to the problem in consideration…

Probabilistic numerics casts numerical tasks, such the numerical solution of differential equations, as inference problems to be solved. One approach is to model the unknown quantity of interest as a random variable, and to constrain this…

We consider a generalization of the classical 100 Prisoner problem and its variant, involving empty boxes, whereby winning probabilities for a team depend on the number of attempts, as well as on the number of winners. We call this the…

We consider the problem of minimizing cost among one-to-one assignments of $n$ jobs onto $n$ machines. The random assignment problem refers to the case when the cost associated with performing jobs on machines are random variables. Aldous…

We consider the issue of reporting the result of search experiment in the most unbiased and efficient way, i.e. in a way which allows an easy interpretation and combination of results and which do not depend on whether the experimenters…

Computing the partition function and the marginals of a global probability distribution are two important issues in any probabilistic inference problem. In a previous work, we presented sub-tree based upper and lower bounds on the partition…

In a classic model analysed by Weitzman an agent is presented with boxes containing prizes. She may open boxes in any order, discover prizes within, and optimally stop. She wishes to maximize the expected value of the greatest prize found,…

This paper is concerned with the problem of recovering an unknown matrix from a small fraction of its entries. This is known as the matrix completion problem, and comes up in a great number of applications, including the famous Netflix…

When P indistinguishable balls are randomly distributed among L distinguishable boxes, and considering the dense system in which P much greater than L, our natural intuition tells us that the box with the average number of balls has the…

The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…

The statistical physics approach to the number partioning problem, a classical NP-hard problem, is both simple and rewarding. Very basic notions and methods from statistical mechanics are enough to obtain analytical results for the phase…

We revisit the noisy binary search model of Karp and Kleinberg, in which we have $n$ coins with unknown probabilities $p_i$ that we can flip. The coins are sorted by increasing $p_i$, and we would like to find where the probability crosses…

A common economic process is crowdsearch, wherein a group of agents is invited to search for a valuable physical or virtual object, e.g. creating and patenting an invention, solving an open scientific problem, or identifying vulnerabilities…

The paper presents complexity results and performance guaranties for a family of approximation algorithms for an optimisation problem arising in software testing and manufacturing. The problem is formulated as a partitioning of a set where…

We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…