Online $b$-Matching with Stochastic Rewards

TL;DR

This paper establishes tight bounds on the performance of online algorithms for the $b$-matching problem with stochastic rewards, showing a fundamental limit of 1-1/e and proposing an algorithm achieving this bound under certain conditions.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of the extsc{StochasticBalance} algorithm with arbitrary non-vanishing probabilities and tight bounds on competitive ratios for stochastic $b$-matching.

Findings

No randomized online algorithm exceeds a 1-1/e competitive ratio.

extsc{StochasticBalance} achieves 1-1/e ratio with increasing server capacities.

Impossibility result applies to the AdWords problem with stochastic rewards.

Abstract

The $b$-matching problem is an allocation problem where the vertices on the left-hand side of a bipartite graph, referred to as servers, may be matched multiple times. In the setting with stochastic rewards, an assignment between an incoming request and a server turns into a match with a given success probability. Mehta and Panigrahi (FOCS 2012) introduced online bipartite matching with stochastic rewards, where each vertex may be matched once. The framework is equally interesting in graphs with vertex capacities. In Internet advertising, for instance, the advertisers seek successful matches with a large number of users. We develop (tight) upper and lower bounds on the competitive ratio of deterministic and randomized online algorithms, for $b$-matching with stochastic rewards. Our bounds hold for both offline benchmarks considered in the literature. As in prior work, we first consider vanishing probabilities. We show that no randomized online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio greater than $1-1/e\approx 0.632$, even for identical vanishing probabilities and arbitrary uniform server capacities. Furthermore, we conduct a primal-dual analysis of the deterministic \textsc{StochasticBalance} algorithm. We prove that it achieves a competitive ratio of $1-1/e$, as server capacities increase, for arbitrary heterogeneous non-vanishing edge probabilities. This performance guarantee holds in a general setting where servers have individual capacities and for the vertex-weighted problem extension. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result for \textsc{StochasticBalance} with arbitrary non-vanishing probabilities. We remark that our impossibility result implies in particular that, for the AdWords problem, no online algorithm can be better than $(1-1/e)$-competitive in the setting with stochastic rewards.