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On the Inapproximability of the Discrete Witsenhausen Problem

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arxiv 1904.05701 v1 pith:RAQXMTFS submitted 2019-04-11 math.OC cs.SYeess.SY

On the Inapproximability of the Discrete Witsenhausen Problem

classification math.OC cs.SYeess.SY
keywords problemcomputingcostdiscreteepsiloninitialnoiseoptimal
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We consider a discrete version of the Witsenhausen problem where all random variables are bounded and take on integer values. Our main goal is to understand the complexity of computing good strategies given the distributions for the initial state and second-stage noise as inputs to the problem. Following Papadimitriou and Tsitsiklis [1], who showed that computing the optimal solution is NP-complete, we construct a sequence of problem instances with the initial state uniform over a set of size $n$ and the noise uniform over a set of size at most $n^2$, such that finding a strategy whose cost is a multiplicative $n^{2-\epsilon}$ approximation to the optimal cost is NP-hard for any $\epsilon > 0$.

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