Generalized budgeted submodular set function maximization

In this paper we consider a generalization of the well-known budgeted maximum coverage problem. We are given a ground set of elements and a set of bins. The goal is to find a subset of elements along with an associated set of bins, such that the overall cost is at most a given budget, and the profit is maximized. Each bin has its own cost and the cost of each element depends on its associated bin. The profit is measured by a monotone submodular function over the elements. We first present an algorithm that guarantees an approximation factor of $\frac{1}{2}\left(1-\frac{1}{e^α}\right)$, where $α\leq 1$ is the approximation factor of an algorithm for a sub-problem. We give two polynomial-time algorithms to solve this sub-problem. The first one gives us $α=1- ε$ if the costs satisfies a specific condition, which is fulfilled in several relevant cases, including the unitary costs case and the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function under a knapsack constraint. The second one guarantees $α=1-\frac{1}{e}-ε$ for the general case. The gap between our approximation guarantees and the known inapproximability bounds is $\frac{1}{2}$. We extend our algorithm to a bi-criterion approximation algorithm in which we are allowed to spend an extra budget up to a factor $β\geq 1$ to guarantee a $\frac{1}{2}\left(1-\frac{1}{e^{αβ}}\right)$-approximation. If we set $β=\frac{1}α\ln \left(\frac{1}{2ε}\right)$, the algorithm achieves an approximation factor of $\frac{1}{2}-ε$, for any arbitrarily small $ε>0$.