Related papers: Sensitivity estimation of conditional value at ris…

Many machine learning problems optimize an objective that must be measured with noise. The primary method is a first order stochastic gradient descent using one or more Monte Carlo (MC) samples at each step. There are settings where…

Estimating the density of a continuous random variable X has been studied extensively in statistics, in the setting where n independent observations of X are given a priori and one wishes to estimate the density from that. Popular methods…

Motivated by the prominence of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a measure for tail risk in settings affected by uncertainty, we develop a new formula for approximating CVaR based optimization objectives and their gradients from limited…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Chance-constrained programs (CCPs) provide a powerful modeling framework for decision-making under uncertainty, but their nonconvex feasible regions make them computationally challenging. A widely used convex inner approximation replaces…

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 highlighted the crucial role systemic risk plays in ensuring stability of financial markets. Accurate assessment of systemic risk would enable regulators to introduce suitable policies to mitigate…

Given measurements from sensors and a set of standard forces, an optimization based approach to identify weakness in structures is introduced. The key novelty lies in letting the load and measurements to be random variables. Subsequently…

We study a risk-constrained version of the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, where the risk measure considered is Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We propose two algorithms that obtain a locally risk-optimal policy by employing four…

Continuous level Monte Carlo is an unbiased, continuous version of the celebrated multilevel Monte Carlo method. The approximation level is assumed to be continuous resulting in a stochastic process describing the quantity of interest.…

We tackle the problem of estimating risk measures of the infinite-horizon discounted cost within a Markov cost process. The risk measures we study include variance, Value-at-Risk (VaR), and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). First, we show…

Value-at-risk (VaR) has been playing the role of a standard risk measure since its introduction. In practice, the delta-normal approach is usually adopted to approximate the VaR of portfolios with option positions. Its effectiveness,…

This paper proposes analytic forms of portfolio CoVaR and CoCVaR on the normal tempered stable market model. Since CoCVaR captures the relative risk of the portfolio with respect to a benchmark return, we apply it to the relative portfolio…

The problem of data uncertainty has motivated the incorporation of robust optimization in various arenas, beyond the Markowitz portfolio optimization. This work presents the extension of the robust optimization framework for the…

We consider the portfolio optimization with risk measured by conditional value-at-risk, based on the stress event of chosen asset being equal to the opposite of its value-at-risk level, under the normality assumption. Solvability conditions…

Enforcing safety in the presence of stochastic uncertainty is a challenging problem. Traditionally, researchers have proposed safety in the statistical mean as a safety measure in this case. However, ensuring safety in the statistical mean…

We consider optimal allocation problems with Conditional Value-At-Risk (CVaR) constraint. We prove, under very mild assumptions, the convergence of the Sample Average Approximation method (SAA) applied to this problem, and we also exhibit a…

We propose a sigmoidal approximation for the value-at-risk (that we call SigVaR) and we use this approximation to tackle nonlinear programs (NLPs) with chance constraints. We prove that the approximation is conservative and that the level…

We consider the problem of estimating the probability of a large loss from a financial portfolio, where the future loss is expressed as a conditional expectation. Since the conditional expectation is intractable in most cases, one may…

We develop a risk-averse safety analysis method for stochastic systems on discrete infinite time horizons. Our method quantifies the notion of risk for a control system in terms of the severity of a harmful random outcome in a fraction of…

We study learning algorithms that seek to minimize the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), when all the learner knows is that the losses incurred may be heavy-tailed. We begin by studying a general-purpose estimator of CVaR for potentially…