论文标题

具有线性相关性和增强性的先知不平等现象

Prophet Inequalities with Linear Correlations and Augmentations

论文作者

Immorlica, Nicole, Singla, Sahil, Waggoner, Bo

论文摘要

在经典的在线决策问题中,试图最大化其价值的决策者检查到达的一系列项目以学习其价值(从已知分布中绘制),并决定何时通过获取当前项目来停止该过程。目的是证明“先知不平等”:她可以做所有价值观的先知和先知。在这项工作中,我们调查了允许值相关的值时。由于非平凡的保证是不可能的,因此我们考虑了Bateni等人引入的自然“线性”相关结构。 [ESA 2015]作为Chawla等人的公共基准值模型的概括。 [GEB 2015]。 一个关键的挑战是,通常用于先知不平等的基于阈值的算法不再保证线性相关性的良好性能。我们将这种障碍与可能具有独立关注的另一个“增强”挑战联系起来:许多现有的先知不平等算法对到达物品的价值的略有增加并不强大。我们利用这种直觉来证明界限(达到恒定因素),以优雅地衰减到达项目的相关量。我们通过设计新的$(1+O(1))$近似值算法来选择多个项目的情况将这些结果扩展到选择多个项目。

In a classical online decision problem, a decision-maker who is trying to maximize her value inspects a sequence of arriving items to learn their values (drawn from known distributions), and decides when to stop the process by taking the current item. The goal is to prove a "prophet inequality": that she can do approximately as well as a prophet with foreknowledge of all the values. In this work, we investigate this problem when the values are allowed to be correlated. Since non-trivial guarantees are impossible for arbitrary correlations, we consider a natural "linear" correlation structure introduced by Bateni et al. [ESA 2015] as a generalization of the common-base value model of Chawla et al. [GEB 2015]. A key challenge is that threshold-based algorithms, which are commonly used for prophet inequalities, no longer guarantee good performance for linear correlations. We relate this roadblock to another "augmentations" challenge that might be of independent interest: many existing prophet inequality algorithms are not robust to slight increase in the values of the arriving items. We leverage this intuition to prove bounds (matching up to constant factors) that decay gracefully with the amount of correlation of the arriving items. We extend these results to the case of selecting multiple items by designing a new $(1+o(1))$ approximation ratio algorithm that is robust to augmentations.

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