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Matroid Secretary Is Equivalent to Contention Resolution

Author Shaddin Dughmi

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LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.58.pdf
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Author Details

Shaddin Dughmi
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Funding

Supported by NSF CAREER Award CCF-1350900 and NSF Grant CCF-2009060.

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Shaddin Dughmi. Matroid Secretary Is Equivalent to Contention Resolution. In 13th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 215, pp. 58:1-58:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.58

Abstract

We show that the matroid secretary problem is equivalent to correlated contention resolution in the online random-order model. Specifically, the matroid secretary conjecture is true if and only if every matroid admits an online random-order contention resolution scheme which, given an arbitrary (possibly correlated) prior distribution over subsets of the ground set, matches the balance ratio of the best offline scheme for that distribution up to a constant. We refer to such a scheme as universal. Our result indicates that the core challenge of the matroid secretary problem lies in resolving contention for positively correlated inputs, in particular when the positive correlation is benign in as much as offline contention resolution is concerned. Our result builds on our previous work which establishes one direction of this equivalence, namely that the secretary conjecture implies universal random-order contention resolution, as well as a weak converse, which derives a matroid secretary algorithm from a random-order contention resolution scheme with only partial knowledge of the distribution. It is this weak converse that we strengthen in this paper: We show that universal random-order contention resolution for matroids, in the usual setting of a fully known prior distribution, suffices to resolve the matroid secretary conjecture in the affirmative.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms
Keywords
  • Contention Resolution
  • Secretary Problems
  • Matroids

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References

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