Approximation Algorithms for Optimal Decision Trees and Adaptive TSP Problems

We consider the problem of constructing optimal decision trees: given a collection of tests which can disambiguate between a set of $m$ possible diseases, each test having a cost, and the a-priori likelihood of the patient having any particular disease, what is a good adaptive strategy to perform these tests to minimize the expected cost to identify the disease? We settle the approximability of this problem by giving a tight $O(\log m)$-approximation algorithm. We also consider a more substantial generalization, the Adaptive TSP problem. Given an underlying metric space, a random subset $S$ of cities is drawn from a known distribution, but $S$ is initially unknown to us--we get information about whether any city is in $S$ only when we visit the city in question. What is a good adaptive way of visiting all the cities in the random subset $S$ while minimizing the expected distance traveled? For this problem, we give the first poly-logarithmic approximation, and show that this algorithm is best possible unless we can improve the approximation guarantees for the well-known group Steiner tree problem.