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We consider statistical methods which invoke a min-max distributionally robust formulation to extract good out-of-sample performance in data-driven optimization and learning problems. Acknowledging the distributional uncertainty in learning…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-08-05 Jose Blanchet , Karthyek Murthy , Viet Anh Nguyen

In this paper, we consider the problem of propagating an uncertain distribution by a possibly non-linear function and quantifying the resulting uncertainty. We measure the uncertainty using the Wasserstein distance, and for a given input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-13 Eduardo Figueiredo , Steven Adams , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Luca Laurenti

Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control is a fundamental control paradigm that is studied in various fields such as engineering, computer science, economics, and neuroscience. It involves controlling a system with linear dynamics and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-02 Bahar Taşkesen , Dan A. Iancu , Çağıl Koçyiğit , Daniel Kuhn

The Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) regulator is a cornerstone of optimal control theory, yet its performance can degrade significantly when the noise distributions deviate from the assumed Gaussian model. To address this limitation, this…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-27 Riccardo Cescon , Andrea Martin , Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

The Wasserstein metric is an important measure of distance between probability distributions, with applications in machine learning, statistics, probability theory, and data analysis. This paper provides upper and lower bounds on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-11 Shashank Singh , Barnabás Póczos

Many decision problems in science, engineering and economics are affected by uncertain parameters whose distribution is only indirectly observable through samples. The goal of data-driven decision-making is to learn a decision from finitely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-05 Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Viet Anh Nguyen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh

In this article we present a general framework for non-concave robust stochastic control problems under model uncertainty in a discrete time finite horizon setting. Our framework allows to consider a variety of different path-dependent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-06 Ariel Neufeld , Julian Sester

We introduce a distributionally robust maximum likelihood estimation model with a Wasserstein ambiguity set to infer the inverse covariance matrix of a $p$-dimensional Gaussian random vector from $n$ independent samples. The proposed model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-21 Viet Anh Nguyen , Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

We revisit Merton's continuous-time portfolio selection through a data-driven, distributionally robust lens. Our aim is to tap the benefits of frequent trading over short horizons while acknowledging that drift is hard to pin down, whereas…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Jose Blanchet , Jiayi Cheng , Hao Liu , Yang Liu

We propose a simple and original approach for solving linear-quadratic mean-field stochastic control problems. We study both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon problems, and allow notably some coefficients to be stochastic. Our method is…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-11-28 Matteo Basei , Huyên Pham

The paper studies the robustness properties of discrete-time stochastic optimal control under Wasserstein model approximation for both discounted-cost and average-cost criteria. Specifically, we study the performance loss when applying an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-10 Yichen Zhou , Yanglei Song , Serdar Yüksel

In the past couple of decades, non-quadratic convex penalties have reshaped signal processing and machine learning; in robust control, however, general convex costs break the Riccati and storage function structure that make the design…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-21 Joudi Hajar , Reza Ghane , Babak Hassibi

We study stochastic optimization problems with chance and risk constraints, where in the latter, risk is quantified in terms of the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). We consider the distributionally robust versions of these problems, where…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-17 Ashish Cherukuri , Ashish R. Hota

We address the challenge of sequential data-driven decision-making under context distributional uncertainty. This problem arises in numerous real-world scenarios where the learner optimizes black-box objective functions in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Francesco Micheli , Efe C. Balta , Anastasios Tsiamis , John Lygeros

Performativity means that the deployment of a predictive model incentivizes agents to strategically adapt their behavior, thereby inducing a model-dependent distribution shift. Practitioners often repeatedly retrain the model on data…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Siyi Wang , Zifan Wang , Karl H. Johansson

In this paper we discuss distributional robustness in the context of stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) for linear time-invariant systems. We derive a simple approximation of the MPC problem under an additive zero-mean i.i.d. noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-07 Christoph Mark , Steven Liu

We consider a discrete time stochastic Markovian control problem under model uncertainty. Such uncertainty not only comes from the fact that the true probability law of the underlying stochastic process is unknown, but the parametric family…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-23 Erhan Bayraktar , Tao Chen

We present a novel $Q$-learning algorithm tailored to solve distributionally robust Markov decision problems where the corresponding ambiguity set of transition probabilities for the underlying Markov decision process is a Wasserstein ball…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ariel Neufeld , Julian Sester

We consider multiperiod stochastic control problems with non-parametric uncertainty on the underlying probabilistic model. We derive a new metric on the space of probability measures, called the adapted $(p, \infty)$--Wasserstein distance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-01 Ruslan Mirmominov , Johannes Wiesel

The problem of quickest detection of a change in the distribution of a sequence of independent observations is considered. It is assumed that the pre-change distribution is known (accurately estimated), while the only information about the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-29 Liyan Xie , Yuchen Liang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli