Related papers: On Feasibility of Sample Average Approximation Sol…
Optimal stopping is the problem of deciding when to stop a stochastic system to obtain the greatest reward, arising in numerous application areas such as finance, healthcare and marketing. State-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional…
We introduce the online stochastic Convex Programming (CP) problem, a very general version of stochastic online problems which allows arbitrary concave objectives and convex feasibility constraints. Many well-studied problems like online…
Given the complexity of modern software systems, it is of great importance that such systems be able to autonomously modify themselves, i.e., self-adapt, with minimal human supervision. It is critical that this adaptation both results in…
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…
We consider a risk-averse stochastic capacity planning problem under uncertain demand in each period. Using a scenario tree representation of the uncertainty, we formulate a multistage stochastic integer program to adjust the capacity…
In networks, there are often more than one source of capacity. The capacities can be permanently or temporarily owned by the decision maker. Depending on the nature of sources, we identify the permanent capacity, spot market capacity and…
Uncertainty is prevalent in engineering design, data-driven problems, and decision making broadly. Due to inherent risk-averseness and ambiguity about assumptions, it is common to address uncertainty by formulating and solving conservative…
We propose dynamic sampled stochastic approximation (SA) methods for stochastic optimization with a heavy-tailed distribution (with finite 2nd moment). The objective is the sum of a smooth convex function with a convex regularizer.…
Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…
Trajectory optimization under uncertainty underpins a wide range of applications in robotics. However, existing methods are limited in terms of reasoning about sources of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty, space and time correlations,…
Stochastic processes wherein the size of the state space is changing as a function of time offer models for the emergence of scale-invariant features observed in complex systems. I consider such a sample-space reducing (SSR) stochastic…
Motivated by applications in reinforcement learning (RL), we study a nonlinear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under Markovian noise, and establish its finite-sample convergence bounds under various stepsizes. Specifically, we show…
Sampling is a fundamental problem in computer science and statistics. However, for a given task and stream, it is often not possible to choose good sampling probabilities in advance. We derive a general framework for adaptively changing the…
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) consist of a set of variables taking values from some finite domain and a set of local constraints on these variables. The objective is to find an assignment to the variables that maximizes the…
The progressive hedging algorithm (PHA) is a cornerstone among algorithms for large-scale stochastic programming problems. However, its traditional implementation is hindered by some limitations, including the requirement to solve all…
We consider convex stochastic optimization problems under different assumptions on the properties of available stochastic subgradient. It is known that, if the value of the objective function is available, one can obtain, in parallel,…
Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding an optimum over a family of convex functions. For instance, finding the projection on the convex functions in $H^k(\Omega)$, and optimizing functionals arising from some…
A computationally efficient method to solve non-convex programming problems with linear equality constraints is presented. The proposed method is based on a recursively feasible and descending sequential convex programming procedure proven…
In the last fifteen the subset sampling method has often been used in reliability problems as a tool for calculating small probabilities. This method is extrapolating from an initial Monte Carlo estimate for the probability content of a…