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A Faster Algorithm for Truth Discovery via Range Cover

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Abstract

Truth discovery is a key problem in data analytics which has received a great deal of attention in recent years. In this problem, we seek to obtain trustworthy information from data aggregated from multiple (possibly) unreliable sources. Most of the existing approaches for this problem are of heuristic nature and do not provide any quality guarantee. Very recently, the first quality-guaranteed algorithm has been discovered. However, the running time of the algorithm depends on the spread ratio of the input points and is fully polynomial only when the spread ratio is relatively small. This could restrict the applicability of the algorithm. To resolve this issue, we propose in this paper a new algorithm which yields a \((1+\epsilon )\)-approximation in near quadratic time for any dataset with constant probability. Our algorithm relies on a data structure called range cover, which is interesting in its own right. The data structure provides a general approach for solving some high dimensional optimization problems by breaking down them into a small number of parametrized cases.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Erie, USA

    Ziyun Huang

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Hu Ding

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, USA

    Jinhui Xu

Authors
  1. Ziyun Huang
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  2. Hu Ding
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  3. Jinhui Xu
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Correspondence to Ziyun Huang.

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The research of the first and third authors was supported in part by NSF through Grants CCF-1422324, IIS-1422591, CNS-1547167, and CCF-1716400. The research of the second author was supported by NSF through Grant CCF-1656905 and a start-up fund from Michigan State University. Part of the research of the first author was conducted when the author was a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo.

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Huang, Z., Ding, H. & Xu, J. A Faster Algorithm for Truth Discovery via Range Cover. Algorithmica 81, 4118–4133 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-019-00562-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-019-00562-z

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