The Competition Complexity of Prophet Inequalities with Correlations

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ezra, Tomer, Garbuz, Tamar
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ezra, Tomer
Garbuz, Tamar
author_facet Ezra, Tomer
Garbuz, Tamar
contents We initiate the study of the prophet inequality problem through the resource augmentation framework in scenarios when the values of the rewards are correlated. Our goal is to determine the number of additional rewards an online algorithm requires to approximate the maximum value of the original instance. While the independent reward case is well understood, we extend this research to account for correlations among rewards. Our results demonstrate that, unlike in the independent case, the required number of additional rewards for approximation depends on the number of original rewards, and that block-threshold algorithms, which are optimal in the independent case, may require an infinite number of additional rewards when correlations are present. We develop asymptotically optimal algorithms for the following three scenarios: (1) where rewards arrive in blocks corresponding to the different copies of the original instance; (2) where rewards across all copies are arbitrarily shuffled; and (3) where rewards arrive in blocks corresponding to the different copies of the original instance, and values within each block are pairwise independent rather than fully correlated.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_06868
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Competition Complexity of Prophet Inequalities with Correlations
Ezra, Tomer
Garbuz, Tamar
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
We initiate the study of the prophet inequality problem through the resource augmentation framework in scenarios when the values of the rewards are correlated. Our goal is to determine the number of additional rewards an online algorithm requires to approximate the maximum value of the original instance. While the independent reward case is well understood, we extend this research to account for correlations among rewards. Our results demonstrate that, unlike in the independent case, the required number of additional rewards for approximation depends on the number of original rewards, and that block-threshold algorithms, which are optimal in the independent case, may require an infinite number of additional rewards when correlations are present. We develop asymptotically optimal algorithms for the following three scenarios: (1) where rewards arrive in blocks corresponding to the different copies of the original instance; (2) where rewards across all copies are arbitrarily shuffled; and (3) where rewards arrive in blocks corresponding to the different copies of the original instance, and values within each block are pairwise independent rather than fully correlated.
title The Competition Complexity of Prophet Inequalities with Correlations
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06868