M-Convex Function Minimization Under L1-Distance Constraint and Its Application to Dock Reallocation in Bike-Sharing System

In this paper, we consider a problem of minimizing an M-convex function under an L1-distance constraint (MML1); the constraint is given by an upper bound for L1-distance between a feasible solution and a given “center.” This is motivated by a nonlinear integer programming problem for reallocation of dock capacity in a bike-sharing system discussed by Freund et al. (2017). The main aim of this paper is to better understand the combinatorial structure of the dock reallocation problem through the connection with M-convexity and show its polynomial-time solvability using this connection. For this, we first show that the dock reallocation problem and its generalizations can be reformulated in the form of (MML1). We then present a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm for (MML1) based on the steepest descent approach. We also propose two polynomial-time algorithms for (MML1) by replacing the L1-distance constraint with a simple linear constraint. Finally, we apply the results for (MML1) to the dock reallocation problem to obtain a pseudo-polynomial-time steepest descent algorithm and also polynomial-time algorithms for this problem. For this purpose, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm for a relaxation of the dock reallocation problem by using a proximity-scaling approach, which is of interest in its own right.

Group Fairness for the Allocation of Indivisible Goods

We consider the problem of fairly dividing a collection of indivisible goods among a set of players. Much of the existing literature on fair division focuses on notions of individual fairness. For instance, envy-freeness requires that no player prefer the set of goods allocated to another player to her own allocation. We observe that an algorithm satisfying such individual fairness notions can still treat groups of players unfairly, with one group desiring the goods allocated to another. Our main contribution is a notion of group fairness, which implies most existing notions of individual fairness. Group fairness (like individual fairness) cannot be satisfied exactly with indivisible goods. Thus, we introduce two “up to one good” style relaxations. We show that, somewhat surprisingly, certain local optima of the Nash welfare function satisfy both relaxations and can be computed in pseudo-polynomial time by local search. Our experiments reveal faster computation and stronger fairness guarantees in practice.

Generalized Contraflow for Evacuation Planning Problem

The research in evacuation planning has been very much motivated due to the rapidly increased number of disasters world wide. It supports to remove the evacuees from dangerous areas to safe areas. Contraflow reconfiguration during evacuation make traffic smooth by reversing the required road directions from dangerous areas to safe areas that improve both flow and speed significantly. On lossy network, the generalized maximum dynamic contraflow and generalized earliest arrival contraflow problems have been solved efficiently with pseudo-polynomial time. This paper focuses in analytical solutions on generalized contraflow for evacuation planning problem. The problems are considered on two terminal lossy networks. We solve the generalized maximum static contraflow problem in pseudo-polynomial time and compute its approximation solution in polynomial time. Moreover, we present a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to compute an approximate generalized maximum dynamic contraflow solution.

A Framework for Sampling-Based XML Data Pricing

While price and data quality should define the major tradeoff for consumers in data markets, prices are usually prescribed by vendors and data quality is not negotiable. In this paper we study a model where data quality can be traded for a discount. We focus on the case of XML documents and consider completeness as the quality dimension. In our setting, the data provider offers an XML document, and sets both the price of the document and a weight to each node of the document, depending on its potential worth. The data consumer proposes a price. If the proposed price is lower than that of the entire document, then the data consumer receives a sample, i.e., a random rooted subtree of the document whose selection depends on the discounted price and the weight of nodes. By requesting several samples, the data consumer can iteratively explore the data in the document.We present a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to select a rooted subtree with prescribed weight uniformly at random, but show that this problem is unfortunately intractable. Yet, we are able to identify several practical cases where our algorithm runs in polynomial time. The first case is uniform random sampling of a rooted subtree with prescribed size rather than weights; the second case restricts to binary weights.As a more challenging scenario for the sampling problem, we also study the uniform sampling of a rooted subtree of prescribed weight and prescribed height. We adapt our pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to this setting and identify tractable cases.

Order Statistics for Probabilistic Graphical Models

We consider the problem of computing r-th order statistics, namely finding an assignment having rank r in a probabilistic graphical model. We show that the problem is NP-hard even when the graphical model has no edges (zero-treewidth models) via a reduction from the partition problem. We use this reduction, specifically a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for number partitioning to yield a pseudo-polynomial time approximation algorithm for solving the r-th order statistics problem in zero- treewidth models. We then extend this algorithm to arbitrary graphical models by generalizing it to tree decompositions, and demonstrate via experimental evaluation on various datasets that our proposed algorithm is more accurate than sampling algorithms.