Selecting observations against adversarial objectives

Andreas Krause, H. Brendan McMahan, Carlos Guestrin, Anupam Gupta

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In many applications, one has to actively select among a set of expensive observations before making an informed decision. Often, we want to select observations which perform well when evaluated with an objective function chosen by an adversary. Examples include minimizing the maximum posterior variance in Gaussian Process regression, robust experimental design, and sensor placement for outbreak detection. In this paper, we present the Submodular Saturation algorithm, a simple and efficient algorithm with strong theoretical approximation guarantees for the case where the possible objective functions exhibit submodularity, an intuitive diminishing returns property. Moreover, we prove that better approximation algorithms do not exist unless NP-complete problems admit efficient algorithms. We evaluate our algorithm on several real-world problems. For Gaussian Process regression, our algorithm compares favorably with state-of-the-art heuristics described in the geostatistics literature, while being simpler, faster and providing theoretical guarantees. For robust experimental design, our algorithm performs favorably compared to SDP-based algorithms.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20 - Proceedings of the 2007 Conference
PublisherNeural Information Processing Systems
ISBN (Print)160560352X, 9781605603520
StatePublished - 2008
Event21st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2007 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: Dec 3 2007Dec 6 2007

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20 - Proceedings of the 2007 Conference

Other

Other21st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2007
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period12/3/0712/6/07

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems

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