Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
We introduce correlated randomized dependent rounding where, given multiple points y^1,...,y^n in some polytope P\subseteq [0,1]^k, the goal is to simultaneously round each y^i to some integral z^i in P while preserving both marginal values and expected distances between the points. In addition to being a natural question in its own right, the correlated randomized dependent rounding problem is motivated by multi-label classification applications that arise in machine learning, e.g., classification of web pages, semantic tagging of images, and functional genomics. The results of this work can be summarized as follows: (1) we present an algorithm for solving the correlated randomized dependent rounding problem in uniform matroids while losing only a factor of O(log{k}) in the distances (k is the size of the ground set); (2) we introduce a novel multi-label classification problem, the metric multi-labeling problem, which captures the above applications. We present a (true) O(log{k})-approximation for the general case of metric multi-labeling and a tight 2-approximation for the special case where there is no limit on the number of labels that can be assigned to an object.
@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.34,
author = {Chen, Shahar and Di Castro, Dotan and Karnin, Zohar and Lewin-Eytan, Liane and Naor, Joseph (Seffi) and Schwartz, Roy},
title = {{Correlated Rounding of Multiple Uniform Matroids and Multi-Label Classification}},
booktitle = {44th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2017)},
pages = {34:1--34:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-041-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2017},
volume = {80},
editor = {Chatzigiannakis, Ioannis and Indyk, Piotr and Kuhn, Fabian and Muscholl, Anca},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.34},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-74612},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.34},
annote = {Keywords: approximation algorithms, randomized rounding, dependent rounding, metric labeling, classification}
}