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Online Stochastic Matching with Unknown Arrival Order: Beating $0.5$ against the Online Optimum

Published: March 25, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2503.19456v1

By: Enze Sun, Zhihao Gavin Tang, Yifan Wang

Potential Business Impact:

Finds better matches when things arrive randomly.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

We study the online stochastic matching problem. Against the offline benchmark, Feldman, Gravin, and Lucier (SODA 2015) designed an optimal $0.5$-competitive algorithm. A recent line of work, initiated by Papadimitriou, Pollner, Saberi, and Wajc (MOR 2024), focuses on designing approximation algorithms against the online optimum. The online benchmark allows positive results surpassing the $0.5$ ratio. In this work, adapting the order-competitive analysis by Ezra, Feldman, Gravin, and Tang (SODA 2023), we design a $0.5+\Omega(1)$ order-competitive algorithm against the online benchmark with unknown arrival order. Our algorithm is significantly different from existing ones, as the known arrival order is crucial to the previous approximation algorithms.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡­πŸ‡° πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ πŸ‡¨πŸ‡³ China, Hong Kong, United States

Page Count
39 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Data Structures and Algorithms