Pareto-Optimal Learning-Augmented Algorithms for Online Conversion Problems
This work addresses online decision-making in financial applications like Bitcoin trading, offering a robust and adaptive solution, though it is incremental in extending existing threshold-based methods.
The paper tackles online conversion problems by integrating machine-learned predictions into threshold-based algorithms to achieve Pareto-optimal trade-offs between consistency and robustness, with numerical experiments on Bitcoin conversion showing improved performance.
This paper leverages machine-learned predictions to design competitive algorithms for online conversion problems with the goal of improving the competitive ratio when predictions are accurate (i.e., consistency), while also guaranteeing a worst-case competitive ratio regardless of the prediction quality (i.e., robustness). We unify the algorithmic design of both integral and fractional conversion problems, which are also known as the 1-max-search and one-way trading problems, into a class of online threshold-based algorithms (OTA). By incorporating predictions into design of OTA, we achieve the Pareto-optimal trade-off of consistency and robustness, i.e., no online algorithm can achieve a better consistency guarantee given for a robustness guarantee. We demonstrate the performance of OTA using numerical experiments on Bitcoin conversion.