Robust Subset Selection by Greedy and Evolutionary Pareto Optimization

Robust Subset Selection by Greedy and Evolutionary Pareto Optimization

Chao Bian, Yawen Zhou, Chao Qian

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4726-4732. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/655

Subset selection, which aims to select a subset from a ground set to maximize some objective function, arises in various applications such as influence maximization and sensor placement. In real-world scenarios, however, one often needs to find a subset which is robust against (i.e., is good over) a number of possible objective functions due to uncertainty, resulting in the problem of robust subset selection. This paper considers robust subset selection with monotone objective functions, relaxing the submodular property required by previous studies. We first show that the greedy algorithm can obtain an approximation ratio with respect to the correlation and submodularity ratios of the objective functions; and then propose EPORSS, an evolutionary Pareto optimization algorithm that can utilize more time to find better subsets. We prove that EPORSS can also be theoretically grounded, achieving a similar approximation guarantee to the greedy algorithm. In addition, we derive the lower bound of the correlation ratio for the application of robust influence maximization, and further conduct experiments to validate the performance of the greedy algorithm and EPORSS.
Keywords:
Search: Evolutionary Computation
Machine Learning: Evolutionary Learning
Search: Combinatorial Search and Optimisation
Search: Heuristic Search