Related papers: Sample Average Approximations of Strongly Convex S…
Discrete-time stochastic systems are an essential modelling tool for many engineering systems. We consider stochastic control systems that are evolving over continuous spaces. For this class of models, methods for the formal verification…
We revisit the so-called sampling and discarding approach used to quantify the probability of constraint violation of a solution to convex scenario programs when some of the original samples are allowed to be discarded. Motivated by two…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a classical algorithm that has had since the early days a huge impact on signal processing, and nowadays on machine learning, due to the necessity to deal with a large amount of data observed with…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
We study robust convex quadratic programs where the uncertain problem parameters can contain both continuous and integer components. Under the natural boundedness assumption on the uncertainty set, we show that the generic problems are…
Concentration inequalities form an essential toolkit in the study of high dimensional (HD) statistical methods. Most of the relevant statistics literature in this regard is based on sub-Gaussian or sub-exponential tail assumptions. In this…
This paper introduces a class of two-stage stochastic minimax problems where the first-stage objective function is nonconvex-concave while the second-stage objective function is strongly convex-concave. We establish properties of the…
The stochastic Auxiliary Problem Principle (APP) algorithm is a general Stochastic Approximation (SA) scheme that turns the resolution of an original optimization problem into the iterative resolution of a sequence of auxiliary problems.…
Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…
The sample average approximation (SAA) approach is applied to risk-neutral optimization problems governed by semilinear elliptic partial differential equations with random inputs. After constructing a compact set that contains the SAA…
We consider linear programming (LP) problems in infinite dimensional spaces that are in general computationally intractable. Under suitable assumptions, we develop an approximation bridge from the infinite-dimensional LP to tractable finite…
This article describes a novel approach to chance-constrained programming based on the sample average approximation (SAA) method. Recent work focuses on heuristic approximations to the SAA problem and we introduce a novel approach which…
We propose a new stochastic first-order algorithmic framework to solve stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problems that covers both finite-sum and expectation settings. Our algorithms rely on the SARAH estimator introduced in…
Asynchronous stochastic approximations (SAs) are an important class of model-free algorithms, tools and techniques that are popular in multi-agent and distributed control scenarios. To counter Bellman's curse of dimensionality, such…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a technique for obtaining approximate solutions to stochastic programs that uses the average from a random sample to approximate the expected value that is being optimized. Since the outcome from…
Chebyshev's inequality provides an upper bound on the tail probability of a random variable based on its mean and variance. While tight, the inequality has been criticized for only being attained by pathological distributions that abuse the…
In this paper, we study a class of stochastic optimization problems, referred to as the \emph{Conditional Stochastic Optimization} (CSO), in the form of $\min_{x \in \mathcal{X}} \EE_{\xi}f_\xi\Big({\EE_{\eta|\xi}[g_\eta(x,\xi)]}\Big)$,…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a fundamental iterative framework with broad applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Classical analyses typically rely on martingale difference or Markov noise with bounded second moments,…