Distributed Pareto Optimization for Subset Selection

The subset selection problem that selects a few items from a ground set arises in many applications such as maximum coverage, influence maximization, sparse regression, etc. The recently proposed POSS algorithm is a powerful approximation solver for this problem. However, POSS requires centralized access to the full ground set, and thus is impractical for large-scale real-world applications, where the ground set is too large to be stored on one single machine. In this paper, we propose a distributed version of POSS (DPOSS) with a bounded approximation guarantee. DPOSS can be easily implemented in the MapReduce framework. Our extensive experiments using Spark, on various real-world data sets with size ranging from thousands to millions, show that DPOSS can achieve competitive performance compared with the centralized POSS, and is almost always better than the state-of-the-art distributed greedy algorithm RandGreeDi.

Authors

• Chao Qian School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
• Guiying Li
• Chao Feng
• Ke Tang Southern University of Science and Technology

Keywords

• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Combinatorial Search and Optimisation
• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Distributed Search
• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search
• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search and Machine Learning