1. Whittle Index Policy for Crawling Ephemeral Content
- Author
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Konstantin Avrachenkov, Vivek S. Borkar, Network Engineering and Operations (NEO ), Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée (CRISAM), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria), Department of Electrical Engineering [IIT-Bombay] (EE-IIT), Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), MALENA, Models for the performance analysis and the control of networks (MAESTRO), Cefipra 5100-IT1, Inria Sophia Antipolis, and INRIA
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,0209 industrial biotechnology ,Mathematical optimization ,Theoretical computer science ,Control and Optimization ,Computer Networks and Communications ,Computer science ,Stochastic modelling ,InformationSystems_INFORMATIONSTORAGEANDRETRIEVAL ,02 engineering and technology ,Systems and Control (eess.SY) ,Crawling ,Scheduling (computing) ,Computer Science - Information Retrieval ,Search engine ,[INFO.INFO-NI]Computer Science [cs]/Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI] ,020901 industrial engineering & automation ,[INFO.INFO-LG]Computer Science [cs]/Machine Learning [cs.LG] ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,FOS: Mathematics ,Mathematics - Optimization and Control ,Restless bandits ,Crawler ,Ephemeral Content ,business.industry ,Ephemeral key ,Web crawling ,Whittle index ,020206 networking & telecommunications ,Optimal control ,Dynamic programming ,Search Engine ,Control and Systems Engineering ,Optimization and Control (math.OC) ,[INFO.INFO-IR]Computer Science [cs]/Information Retrieval [cs.IR] ,Signal Processing ,Computer Science - Systems and Control ,Artificial intelligence ,[MATH.MATH-OC]Mathematics [math]/Optimization and Control [math.OC] ,[INFO.INFO-DC]Computer Science [cs]/Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC] ,Heuristics ,Web crawler ,business ,Information Retrieval (cs.IR) ,Curse of dimensionality - Abstract
International audience; We consider the task of scheduling a crawler to retrieve from several sites their ephemeral content. This is content, such as news or posts at social network groups, for which a user typically loses interest after some days or hours. Thus development of a timely crawling policy for ephemeral information sources is very important. We first formulate this problem as an optimal control problem with average reward. The reward can be measured in terms of the number of clicks or relevant search requests. The problem in its exact formulation suffers from the curse of dimensionality and quickly becomes intractable even with moderate number of information sources. Fortunately, this problem admits a Whittle index, a celebrated heuristics which leads to problem decomposition and to a very simple and efficient crawling policy. We derive the Whittle index for a simple deterministic model and provide its theoretical justification. We also outline an extension to a fully stochastic model.
- Published
- 2018
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