We study the bin covering problem where a multiset of items from a fixed set S ⊆ (0,1] must be split into disjoint subsets while maximizing the number of subsets whose contents sum to at least 1. We focus on the online discrete variant, where S is finite, and items arrive sequentially. In the purely online setting, we show that the competitive ratios of best deterministic (and randomized) algorithms converge to 1/2 for large S, similar to the continuous setting. Therefore, we consider the problem under the prediction setting, where algorithms may access a vector of frequencies predicting the frequency of items of each size in the instance. In this setting, we introduce a family of online algorithms that perform near-optimally when the predictions are correct. Further, we introduce a second family of more robust algorithms that presents a tradeoff between the performance guarantees when the predictions are perfect and when predictions are adversarial. Finally, we consider a stochastic setting where items are drawn independently from any fixed but unknown distribution of S. Using results from the PAC-learnability of probabilities in discrete distributions, we introduce a purely online algorithm whose average-case performance is near-optimal with high probability for all finite sets S and all distributions of S.
@InProceedings{berg_et_al:LIPIcs.SWAT.2024.10, author = {Berg, Magnus and Kamali, Shahin}, title = {{Online Bin Covering with Frequency Predictions}}, booktitle = {19th Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory (SWAT 2024)}, pages = {10:1--10:17}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-318-8}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {294}, editor = {Bodlaender, Hans L.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SWAT.2024.10}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-200504}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SWAT.2024.10}, annote = {Keywords: Bin Covering, Online Algorithms with Predictions, PAC Learning, Learning-Augmented Algorithms} }
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