Improved Bounds in Stochastic Matching and Optimization

Real-world problems often have parameters that are uncertain during the optimization phase; stochastic optimization or stochastic programming is a key approach introduced by Beale and by Dantzig in the 1950s to address such uncertainty. Matching is a classical problem in combinatorial optimization. Modern stochastic versions of this problem model problems in kidney exchange, for instance. We improve upon the current-best approximation bound of 3.709 for stochastic matching due to Adamczyk et al. (in: Algorithms-ESA 2015, Springer, Berlin, 2015 ) to 3.224; we also present improvements on Bansal et al. (Algorithmica 63(4):733–762, 2012 ) for hypergraph matching and for relaxed versions of the problem. These results are obtained by improved analyses and/or algorithms for rounding linear-programming relaxations of these problems.