Approximating Happiness Maximizing Set Problems

A Happiness Maximizing Set (HMS) is a useful concept in which a smaller subset of a database is selected while mostly preserving the best scores along every possible utility function. In this paper, we study the $k$-Happiness Maximizing Sets ($k$-HMS) and Average Happiness Maximizing Sets (AHMS) problems. Specifically, $k$-HMS selects $r$ records from the database such that the minimum happiness ratio between the $k$-th best score in the database and the best score in the selected records for any possible utility function is maximized. Meanwhile, AHMS maximizes the average of this ratio within a distribution of utility functions. $k$-HMS and AHMS are equivalent to the more established $k$-Regret Minimizing Sets ($k$-RMS) and Average Regret Minimizing Sets (ARMS) problems, but allow for the derivation of stronger theoretical results and more natural approximation schemes. In this paper, we show that the problem of approximating $k$-HMS within any finite factor is NP-Hard when the dimensionality of the database is unconstrained and extend the result to an inapproximability proof of $k$-RMS. We then provide approximation algorithms for AHMS with better approximation ratios and time complexities than known algorithms for ARMS. Finally, we provide dataset reduction schemes which can be used to reduce the runtime of existing heuristic based algorithms, as well as to derive polynomial-time approximation schemes for both $k$-HMS and AHMS when dimensionality is fixed. Finally, we provide experimental validation showing that our AHMS algorithm achieves the same happiness as the existing Greedy Shrink FAM algorithm while running faster by over 2 orders of magnitude on even a small dataset of 17265 data points while our reduction scheme was able to reduce runtimes by up to 93% (from 4.2 hours to 16.7 minutes) while keeping happiness within 90\% of the original on the largest tested settings.