No Arabic abstract
Inverse multiobjective optimization provides a general framework for the unsupervised learning task of inferring parameters of a multiobjective decision making problem (DMP), based on a set of observed decisions from the human expert. However, the performance of this framework relies critically on the availability of an accurate DMP, sufficient decisions of high quality, and a parameter space that contains enough information about the DMP. To hedge against the uncertainties in the hypothetical DMP, the data, and the parameter space, we investigate in this paper the distributionally robust approach for inverse multiobjective optimization. Specifically, we leverage the Wasserstein metric to construct a ball centered at the empirical distribution of these decisions. We then formulate a Wasserstein distributionally robust inverse multiobjective optimization problem (WRO-IMOP) that minimizes a worst-case expected loss function, where the worst case is taken over all distributions in the Wasserstein ball. We show that the excess risk of the WRO-IMOP estimator has a sub-linear convergence rate. Furthermore, we propose the semi-infinite reformulations of the WRO-IMOP and develop a cutting-plane algorithm that converges to an approximate solution in finite iterations. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both a synthetic multiobjective quadratic program and a real world portfolio optimization problem.
We propose kernel distributionally robust optimization (Kernel DRO) using insights from the robust optimization theory and functional analysis. Our method uses reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) to construct a wide range of convex ambiguity sets, which can be generalized to sets based on integral probability metrics and finite-order moment bounds. This perspective unifies multiple existing robust and stochastic optimization methods. We prove a theorem that generalizes the classical duality in the mathematical problem of moments. Enabled by this theorem, we reformulate the maximization with respect to measures in DRO into the dual program that searches for RKHS functions. Using universal RKHSs, the theorem applies to a broad class of loss functions, lifting common limitations such as polynomial losses and knowledge of the Lipschitz constant. We then establish a connection between DRO and stochastic optimization with expectation constraints. Finally, we propose practical algorithms based on both batch convex solvers and stochastic functional gradient, which apply to general optimization and machine learning tasks.
We propose and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization of convex losses with conditional value at risk (CVaR) and $chi^2$ divergence uncertainty sets. We prove that our algorithms require a number of gradient evaluations independent of training set size and number of parameters, making them suitable for large-scale applications. For $chi^2$ uncertainty sets these are the first such guarantees in the literature, and for CVaR our guarantees scale linearly in the uncertainty level rather than quadratically as in previous work. We also provide lower bounds proving the worst-case optimality of our algorithms for CVaR and a penalized version of the $chi^2$ problem. Our primary technical contributions are novel bounds on the bias of batch robust risk estimation and the variance of a multilevel Monte Carlo gradient estimator due to [Blanchet & Glynn, 2015]. Experiments on MNIST and ImageNet confirm the theoretical scaling of our algorithms, which are 9--36 times more efficient than full-batch methods.
In prescriptive analytics, the decision-maker observes historical samples of $(X, Y)$, where $Y$ is the uncertain problem parameter and $X$ is the concurrent covariate, without knowing the joint distribution. Given an additional covariate observation $x$, the goal is to choose a decision $z$ conditional on this observation to minimize the cost $mathbb{E}[c(z,Y)|X=x]$. This paper proposes a new distributionally robust approach under Wasserstein ambiguity sets, in which the nominal distribution of $Y|X=x$ is constructed based on the Nadaraya-Watson kernel estimator concerning the historical data. We show that the nominal distribution converges to the actual conditional distribution under the Wasserstein distance. We establish the out-of-sample guarantees and the computational tractability of the framework. Through synthetic and empirical experiments about the newsvendor problem and portfolio optimization, we demonstrate the strong performance and practical value of the proposed framework.
Wasserstein distance-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has received much attention lately due to its ability to provide a robustness interpretation of various learning models. Moreover, many of the DRO problems that arise in the learning context admits exact convex reformulations and hence can be tackled by off-the-shelf solvers. Nevertheless, the use of such solvers severely limits the applicability of DRO in large-scale learning problems, as they often rely on general purpose interior-point algorithms. On the other hand, there are very few works that attempt to develop fast iterative methods to solve these DRO problems, which typically possess complicated structures. In this paper, we take a first step towards resolving the above difficulty by developing a first-order algorithmic framework for tackling a class of Wasserstein distance-based distributionally robust logistic regression (DRLR) problem. Specifically, we propose a novel linearized proximal ADMM to solve the DRLR problem, whose objective is convex but consists of a smooth term plus two non-separable non-smooth terms. We prove that our method enjoys a sublinear convergence rate. Furthermore, we conduct three different experiments to show its superb performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. In particular, our method can achieve the same accuracy up to 800+ times faster than the standard off-the-shelf solver.
Wasserstein textbf{D}istributionally textbf{R}obust textbf{O}ptimization (DRO) is concerned with finding decisions that perform well on data that are drawn from the worst-case probability distribution within a Wasserstein ball centered at a certain nominal distribution. In recent years, it has been shown that various DRO formulations of learning models admit tractable convex reformulations. However, most existing works propose to solve these convex reformulations by general-purpose solvers, which are not well-suited for tackling large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on a family of Wasserstein distributionally robust support vector machine (DRSVM) problems and propose two novel epigraphical projection-based incremental algorithms to solve them. The updates in each iteration of these algorithms can be computed in a highly efficient manner. Moreover, we show that the DRSVM problems considered in this paper satisfy a Holderian growth condition with explicitly determined growth exponents. Consequently, we are able to establish the convergence rates of the proposed incremental algorithms. Our numerical results indicate that the proposed methods are orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art, and the performance gap grows considerably as the problem size increases.