Optimizing Multiple Simultaneous Objectives for Voting and Facility Location

TL;DR

This paper investigates the simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives in facility location and social choice, providing tight bounds on approximation factors and demonstrating that multiple objectives can be approximated within a small constant.

Contribution

It introduces tight bounds for approximating pairs of objectives and shows that multiple objectives can be approximated within a small constant, advancing multi-objective optimization in facility location.

Findings

Any pair of objectives can be approximated within a factor of 1+√2.

For more than two objectives, a constant approximation factor close to 3 is achievable.

Simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives significantly outperforms single-objective approaches.

Abstract

We study the classic facility location setting, where we are given $n$ clients and $m$ possible facility locations in some arbitrary metric space, and want to choose a location to build a facility. The exact same setting also arises in spatial social choice, where voters are the clients and the goal is to choose a candidate or outcome, with the distance from a voter to an outcome representing the cost of this outcome for the voter (e.g., based on their ideological differences). Unlike most previous work, we do not focus on a single objective to optimize (e.g., the total distance from clients to the facility, or the maximum distance, etc.), but instead attempt to optimize several different objectives simultaneously. More specifically, we consider the $l$-centrum family of objectives, which includes the total distance, max distance, and many others. We present tight bounds on how well any pair of such objectives (e.g., max and sum) can be simultaneously approximated compared to their optimum outcomes. In particular, we show that for any such pair of objectives, it is always possible to choose an outcome which simultaneously approximates both objectives within a factor of $1+\sqrt{2}$, and give a precise characterization of how this factor improves as the two objectives being optimized become more similar. For $q>2$ different centrum objectives, we show that it is always possible to approximate all $q$ of these objectives within a small constant, and that this constant approaches 3 as $q\rightarrow \infty$. Our results show that when optimizing only a few simultaneous objectives, it is always possible to form an outcome which is a significantly better than 3 approximation for all of these objectives.