Determinantal Learning for Subset Selection in Wireless Networks

Subset selection is central to many wireless communication problems, including link scheduling, power allocation, and spectrum management. However, these problems are often NP-complete, because of which heuristic algorithms applied to solve these problems struggle with scalability in large-scale settings. To address this, we propose a determinantal point process-based learning (DPPL) framework for efficiently solving general subset selection problems in massive networks. The key idea is to model the optimal subset as a realization of a determinantal point process (DPP), which balances the trade-off between quality (signal strength) and similarity (mutual interference) by enforcing negative correlation in the selection of {\em similar} links (those that create significant mutual interference). However, conventional methods for constructing similarity matrices in DPP impose decomposability and symmetry constraints that often do not hold in practice. To overcome this, we introduce a new method based on the Gershgorin Circle Theorem for constructing valid similarity matrices. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by applying it to two canonical wireless network settings: an ad hoc network in 2D and a cellular network serving drones in 3D. Simulation results show that DPPL selects near-optimal subsets that maximize network sum-rate while significantly reducing computational complexity compared to traditional optimization methods, demonstrating its scalability for large-scale networks.