Related papers: Combating Conservativeness in Data-Driven Optimiza…
Sparse reduced rank regression is an essential statistical learning method. In the contemporary literature, estimation is typically formulated as a nonconvex optimization that often yields to a local optimum in numerical computation. Yet,…
We develop a new computing paradigm, which we refer to as data-driven computing, according to which calculations are carried out directly from experimental material data and pertinent constraints and conservation laws, such as compatibility…
We consider an unconstrained continuous optimization problem where, in each iteration, gradient estimates may be arbitrarily corrupted with a probability greater than 1/2. Additionally, function value estimates may exhibit heavy-tailed…
The design of data-driven formulations for machine learning and decision-making with good out-of-sample performance is a key challenge. The observation that good in-sample performance does not guarantee good out-of-sample performance is…
This work addresses inverse linear optimization where the goal is to infer the unknown cost vector of a linear program. Specifically, we consider the data-driven setting in which the available data are noisy observations of optimal…
Model-based offline optimization with dynamics-aware policy provides a new perspective for policy learning and out-of-distribution generalization, where the learned policy could adapt to different dynamics enumerated at the training stage.…
Unbiased and consistent variance estimators generally do not exist for design-based treatment effect estimators because experimenters never observe more than one potential outcome for any unit. The problem is exacerbated by interference and…
We study statistical inference and distributionally robust solution methods for stochastic optimization problems, focusing on confidence intervals for optimal values and solutions that achieve exact coverage asymptotically. We develop a…
Given subsets of uncertain values, we study the problem of identifying the subset of minimum total value (sum of the uncertain values) by querying as few values as possible. This set selection problem falls into the field of explorable…
We consider a multi-period stochastic control problem where the multivariate driving stochastic factor of the system has known marginal distributions but uncertain dependence structure. To solve the problem, we propose to implement the…
The requirement for identifying accurate system representations has not only been a challenge to fulfill, but it has compromised the scalability of formal methods, as the resulting models are often too complex for effective decision making…
We study the effect of stochasticity in on-policy policy optimization, and make the following four contributions. First, we show that the preferability of optimization methods depends critically on whether stochastic versus exact gradients…
In this work, we study optimization specified only through a comparison oracle: given two points, it reports which one is preferred. We call it function-free optimization because we do not assume access to, nor the existence of, a canonical…
Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
We consider the problem of computing the maximal invariant set of discrete-time black-box nonlinear systems without analytic dynamical models. Under the assumption that the system is asymptotically stable, the maximal invariant set…
When attempting to recover functions from observational data, one naturally seeks to do so in an optimal manner with respect to some modeling assumption. With a focus put on the worst-case setting, this is the standard goal of Optimal…
Safe and economic operation of networked systems is often challenging. Optimization-based schemes are frequently considered, since they achieve near-optimality while ensuring safety via the explicit consideration of constraints. In…
We develop and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization (DRO) of convex losses. In particular, we consider group-structured and bounded $f$-divergence uncertainty sets. Our approach relies on an accelerated method that…
In robust optimization, the general aim is to find a solution that performs well over a set of possible parameter outcomes, the so-called uncertainty set. In this paper, we assume that the uncertainty size is not fixed, and instead aim at…