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Main Authors: Artman, Conor M., Mate, Aditya, Nwankwo, Ezinne, Heching, Aliza, Idé, Tsuyoshi, Navrátil, Jiří, Shanmugam, Karthikeyan, Sun, Wei, Varshney, Kush R., Goldkind, Lauri, Kroch, Gidi, Sawyer, Jaclyn, Watson, Ian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10638
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author Artman, Conor M.
Mate, Aditya
Nwankwo, Ezinne
Heching, Aliza
Idé, Tsuyoshi
Navrátil, Jiří
Shanmugam, Karthikeyan
Sun, Wei
Varshney, Kush R.
Goldkind, Lauri
Kroch, Gidi
Sawyer, Jaclyn
Watson, Ian
author_facet Artman, Conor M.
Mate, Aditya
Nwankwo, Ezinne
Heching, Aliza
Idé, Tsuyoshi
Navrátil, Jiří
Shanmugam, Karthikeyan
Sun, Wei
Varshney, Kush R.
Goldkind, Lauri
Kroch, Gidi
Sawyer, Jaclyn
Watson, Ian
contents We developed a common algorithmic solution addressing the problem of resource-constrained outreach encountered by social change organizations with different missions and operations: Breaking Ground -- an organization that helps individuals experiencing homelessness in New York transition to permanent housing and Leket -- the national food bank of Israel that rescues food from farms and elsewhere to feed the hungry. Specifically, we developed an estimation and optimization approach for partially-observed episodic restless bandits under $k$-step transitions. The results show that our Thompson sampling with Markov chain recovery (via Stein variational gradient descent) algorithm significantly outperforms baselines for the problems of both organizations. We carried out this work in a prospective manner with the express goal of devising a flexible-enough but also useful-enough solution that can help overcome a lack of sustainable impact in data science for social good.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_10638
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A resource-constrained stochastic scheduling algorithm for homeless street outreach and gleaning edible food
Artman, Conor M.
Mate, Aditya
Nwankwo, Ezinne
Heching, Aliza
Idé, Tsuyoshi
Navrátil, Jiří
Shanmugam, Karthikeyan
Sun, Wei
Varshney, Kush R.
Goldkind, Lauri
Kroch, Gidi
Sawyer, Jaclyn
Watson, Ian
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
We developed a common algorithmic solution addressing the problem of resource-constrained outreach encountered by social change organizations with different missions and operations: Breaking Ground -- an organization that helps individuals experiencing homelessness in New York transition to permanent housing and Leket -- the national food bank of Israel that rescues food from farms and elsewhere to feed the hungry. Specifically, we developed an estimation and optimization approach for partially-observed episodic restless bandits under $k$-step transitions. The results show that our Thompson sampling with Markov chain recovery (via Stein variational gradient descent) algorithm significantly outperforms baselines for the problems of both organizations. We carried out this work in a prospective manner with the express goal of devising a flexible-enough but also useful-enough solution that can help overcome a lack of sustainable impact in data science for social good.
title A resource-constrained stochastic scheduling algorithm for homeless street outreach and gleaning edible food
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10638