Related papers: A Block Coordinate Ascent Algorithm for Mean-Varia…
It is well known that mean-variance portfolio selection is a time-inconsistent optimal control problem in the sense that it does not satisfy Bellman's optimality principle and therefore the usual dynamic programming approach fails. We…
Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…
This paper studies a continuous-time market {under stochastic environment} where an agent, having specified an investment horizon and a target terminal mean return, seeks to minimize the variance of the return with multiple stocks and a…
The block coordinate descent (BCD) method is widely used for minimizing a continuous function f of several block variables. At each iteration of this method, a single block of variables is optimized, while the remaining variables are held…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in costs in addition to minimizing a standard criterion. Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a relatively new risk measure that…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
In this paper, we study multi-block min-max bilevel optimization problems, where the upper level is non-convex strongly-concave minimax objective and the lower level is a strongly convex objective, and there are multiple blocks of dual…
We consider the minimization of a sum of an expectation-valued coordinate-wise $L_i$-smooth nonconvex function and a nonsmooth block-separable convex regularizer. We propose an asynchronous variance-reduced algorithm, where in each…
This paper studies the continuous time mean-variance portfolio selection problem with one kind of non-linear wealth dynamics. To deal the expectation constraint, an auxiliary stochastic control problem is firstly solved by two new…
Algorithms with fast convergence, small number of data access, and low per-iteration complexity are particularly favorable in the big data era, due to the demand for obtaining \emph{highly accurate solutions} to problems with \emph{a large…
Coordinate ascent variational inference is an important algorithm for inference in probabilistic models, but it is slow because it updates only a single variable at a time. Block coordinate methods perform inference faster by updating…
Choosing a portfolio of risky assets over time that maximizes the expected return at the same time as it minimizes portfolio risk is a classical problem in Mathematical Finance and is referred to as the dynamic Markowitz problem (when the…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Quantile is a popular performance measure for a stochastic system to evaluate its variability and risk. To reduce the risk, selecting the actions that minimize the tail quantiles of some loss distributions is typically of interest for…
Motivated by practical applications, we explore the constrained multi-period mean-variance portfolio selection problem within a market characterized by a dynamic factor model. This model captures predictability in asset returns driven by…
Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
We discuss a general approach to building non-asymptotic confidence bounds for stochastic optimization problems. Our principal contribution is the observation that a Sample Average Approximation of a problem supplies upper and lower bounds…
This paper investigates asymptotic behaviors of gradient descent algorithms (particularly accelerated gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent) in the context of stochastic optimization arising in statistics and machine learning…
In this paper, we document a novel machine learning based bottom-up approach for static and dynamic portfolio optimization on, potentially, a large number of assets. The methodology applies to general constrained optimization problems and…