Combinatorial Auctions via Machine Learning-based Preference Elicitation

Authors: Gianluca Brero, Benjamin Lubin, Sven Seuken

IJCAI 2018 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We validate PVM experimentally in several spectrum auction domains, and we show that it achieves high allocative efficiency even when only few values are elicited from the bidders. 6 Experimental Evaluation In this section, we present the experimental evaluation of our new approach. First, we introduce our experiment set-up. Then we evaluate the performance of our ML-based elicitation algorithm on its own, before we finally evaluate the performance of our Pseudo-VCG Mechanism (PVM).
Researcher Affiliation Academia 1 Department of Informatics, University of Zurich 2 Information Systems Department, Boston University School of Management brero@ifi.uzh.ch, blubin@bu.edu, seuken@ifi.uzh.ch
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1: ML-based Elicitation Algorithm. ... Algorithm 2: Pseudo-VCG Mechanism (PVM)
Open Source Code No The paper does not provide a direct link to the source code for the methodology described, nor does it explicitly state that the code is publicly released or available in supplementary materials.
Open Datasets Yes We use the Spectrum Auction Test Suite (SATS) version 0.5.2 [Weiss et al., 2017] for our experiments, which allows us to easily generate thousands of auction instances on demand. ... We tested our approach on three of the value models provided by SATS: The Global Synergy Value Model (GSVM) [Goeree and Holt, 2008], The Local Synergy Value Model (LSVM) [Scheffel et al., 2012], The Multi-Region Value Model (MRVM) [Weiss et al., 2017].
Dataset Splits Yes In each domain, the optimal c0 under cap ce was selected using hold-out data, resulting in c 0 = 40 for GSVM and LSVM and c 0 = 30 for MRVM. As discussed in Section 5, we use SVRs with linear and quadratic kernels as the ML algorithm. The meta-parameters of the SVR were tuned using hold-out data.
Hardware Specification Yes We conducted our experiments on machines with Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 2.20GHz processors with 40 logical cores.
Software Dependencies Yes The integer programs (IPs) used to find the allocations at were solved with CPLEX Studio (version 1261).
Experiment Setup Yes To achieve a total number of queries comparable to that found in real-world auctions, we used ce = 50 for GSVM and LSVM, and ce = 100 in MRVM. In each domain, the optimal c0 under cap ce was selected using hold-out data, resulting in c 0 = 40 for GSVM and LSVM and c 0 = 30 for MRVM. The integer programs (IPs) used to find the allocations at were solved with CPLEX Studio (version 1261). We set a time limit of 1h for solving each IP and, when the time limit was reached, adopted the best solution found so far. ... allocated 3 logical cores to CPLEX for each elicitation run, such that we never requested more than the available number of cores on a single machine.