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A sequential quadratic optimization algorithm for minimizing an objective function defined by an expectation subject to nonlinear inequality and equality constraints is proposed, analyzed, and tested. The context of interest is when it is…
Estimating failure probabilities of engineering systems is an important problem in many engineering fields. In this work we consider such problems where the failure probability is extremely small (e.g $\leq10^{-10}$). In this case, standard…
We present a stochastic setting for optimization problems with nonsmooth convex separable objective functions over linear equality constraints. To solve such problems, we propose a stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers…
Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation is the problem of determining the value of a given Boolean function f on an unknown input x, when each bit of x_i of x can only be determined by paying an associated cost c_i. The assumption is that x…
The focus of this article is the approximation of functions which are analytic on a compact interval except at the endpoints. Typical numerical methods for approximating such functions depend upon the use of particular conformal maps from…
Searches are conducted to find missing persons and/or objects given uncertain information, imperfect observers and large search areas in Search and Rescue (SAR). In many scenarios, such as Maritime SAR, expected survival times are short and…
We consider stochastic optimization problems with non-convex functional constraints, such as those arising in trajectory generation, sparse approximation, and robust classification. To this end, we put forth a recursive momentum-based…
For obtaining optimal first-order convergence guarantee for stochastic optimization, it is necessary to use a recurrent data sampling algorithm that samples every data point with sufficient frequency. Most commonly used data sampling…
This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…
We introduce computational methods that allow for effective estimation of a flexible, parametric non-stationary spatial model when the field size is too large to compute the multivariate normal likelihood directly. In this method, the field…
In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…
In statistics and machine learning, logistic regression is a widely-used supervised learning technique primarily employed for binary classification tasks. When the number of observations greatly exceeds the number of predictor variables, we…
Many online companies sell advertisement space in second-price auctions with reserve. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic method to learn a profitable strategy to set the reserve price. We use historical auction data with features to…
In this paper, we formulate the new multi-objective coverage (MOC) problem where our goal is to identify a small set of representative samples whose predicted outcomes broadly cover the feasible multi-objective space. This problem is of…
We study unconstrained optimization problems with nonsmooth and convex objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed method approximates the expected objective function with a sample average function using…
We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…
Stochastic Approximation has been a prominent set of tools for solving problems with noise and uncertainty. Increasingly, it becomes important to solve optimization problems wherein there is noise in both a set of constraints that a…
Some classical uncertainty quantification problems require the estimation of multiple expectations. Estimating all of them accurately is crucial and can have a major impact on the analysis to perform, and standard existing Monte Carlo…
We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a class of techniques to sample approximately from any sequence of probability distributions using a combination of importance sampling and resampling steps. This paper is concerned with the…