No Arabic abstract
Adaptive robust optimization problems are usually solved approximately by restricting the adaptive decisions to simple parametric decision rules. However, the corresponding approximation error can be substantial. In this paper we show that two-stage robust and distributionally robust linear programs can often be reformulated exactly as conic programs that scale polynomially with the problem dimensions. Specifically, when the ambiguity set constitutes a 2-Wasserstein ball centered at a discrete distribution, then the distributionally robust linear program is equivalent to a copositive program (if the problem has complete recourse) or can be approximated arbitrarily closely by a sequence of copositive programs (if the problem has sufficiently expensive recourse). These results directly extend to the classical robust setting and motivate strong tractable approximations of two-stage problems based on semidefinite approximations of the copositive cone. We also demonstrate that the two-stage distributionally robust optimization problem is equivalent to a tractable linear program when the ambiguity set constitutes a 1-Wasserstein ball centered at a discrete distribution and there are no support constraints.
In this paper, we propose a discretization scheme for the two-stage stochastic linear complementarity problem (LCP) where the underlying random data are continuously distributed. Under some moderate conditions, we derive qualitative and quantitative convergence for the solutions obtained from solving the discretized two-stage stochastic LCP (SLCP). We explain how the discretized two-stage SLCP may be solved by the well-known progressive hedging method (PHM). Moreover, we extend the discussion by considering a two-stage distributionally robust LCP (DRLCP) with moment constraints and proposing a discretization scheme for the DRLCP. As an application, we show how the SLCP and DRLCP models can be used to study equilibrium arising from two-stage duopoly game where each player plans to set up its optimal capacity at present with anticipated competition for production in future.
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.
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.
In this paper, we show that the popular K-means clustering problem can equivalently be reformulated as a conic program of polynomial size. The arising convex optimization problem is NP-hard, but amenable to a tractable semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation that is tighter than the current SDP relaxation schemes in the literature. In contrast to the existing schemes, our proposed SDP formulation gives rise to solutions that can be leveraged to identify the clusters. We devise a new approximation algorithm for K-means clustering that utilizes the improved formulation and empirically illustrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art solution schemes.
We introduce and study conic geometric programs (CGPs), which are convex optimization problems that unify geometric programs (GPs) and conic optimization problems such as semidefinite programs (SDPs). A CGP consists of a linear objective function that is to be minimized subject to affine constraints, convex conic constraints, and upper bound constraints on sums of exponential and affine functions. The conic constraints are the central feature of conic programs such as SDPs, while upper bounds on combined exponential/affine functions are generalizations of the types of constraints found in GPs. The dual of a CGP involves the maximization of the negative relative entropy between two nonnegative vectors jointly, subject to affine and conic constraints on the two vectors. Although CGPs contain GPs and SDPs as special instances, computing global optima of CGPs is not much harder than solving GPs and SDPs. More broadly, the CGP framework facilitates a range of new applications that fall outside the scope of SDPs and GPs. Specifically, we demonstrate the utility of CGPs in providing solutions to problems such as permanent maximization, hitting-time estimation in dynamical systems, the computation of the capacity of channels transmitting quantum information, and robust optimization formulations of GPs.