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Selecting Observations against Adversarial Objectives
Andreas Krause · H. Brendan McMahan · Carlos Guestrin · Anupam Gupta

Tue Dec 04 05:20 PM -- 05:30 PM (PST) @
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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 well compared to SDP-based algorithms.

Author Information

Andreas Krause (ETH Zurich)
H. Brendan McMahan (Google, Inc.)
Carlos Guestrin (Apple & University of Washington)
Anupam Gupta (Carnegie Mellon University)

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