Related papers: PASTA: Pessimistic Assortment Optimization
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
By transforming identification and control for nonlinear system into optimization problems, a novel optimization method named state transition algorithm (STA) is introduced to solve the problems. In the proposed STA, a solution to a…
Stochastic optimization is one of the central problems in Machine Learning and Theoretical Computer Science. In the standard model, the algorithm is given a fixed distribution known in advance. In practice though, one may acquire at a cost…
Consider a storage area where arriving items are stored temporarily in bounded capacity stacks until their departure. We look into the problem of deciding where to put an arriving item with the objective of minimizing the maximum number of…
This paper aims to motivate stochastic optimization problems from a statistical perspective and a statistical learning perspective, where the goal is to maximize the log-likelihood or minimize the population risk. We briefly describe the…
We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…
This paper provides a new way of developing the fast iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (FISTA) that is widely used for minimizing composite convex functions with a nonsmooth term such as the $\ell_1$ regularizer. In particular,…
We propose a new clustering approach, called optimality-based clustering, that clusters data points based on their latent decision-making preferences. We assume that each data point is a decision generated by a decision-maker who…
We introduce a stochastic version of the cutting-plane method for a large class of data-driven Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization (MINLO) problems. We show that under very weak assumptions the stochastic algorithm is able to converge to…
We study a fundamental model of online preference aggregation, where an algorithm maintains an ordered list of $n$ elements. An input is a stream of preferred sets $R_1, R_2, \dots, R_t, \dots$. Upon seeing $R_t$ and without knowledge of…
Robust Optimization has traditionally taken a pessimistic, or worst-case viewpoint of uncertainty which is motivated by a desire to find sets of optimal policies that maintain feasibility under a variety of operating conditions. In this…
Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…
Many real-world resource allocation systems, such as humanitarian logistics and vaccine distribution, must preposition limited supply across multiple locations before demand is realized while stockouts incur irreversible service losses. To…
Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…
We address the problem of active online assortment optimization problem with preference feedback, which is a framework for modeling user choices and subsetwise utility maximization. The framework is useful in various real-world applications…
In statistics, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) is a regression method that performs both variable selection and regularization. There is a lot of literature available, discussing the statistical properties of the…
The assortment problem in revenue management is the problem of deciding which subset of products to offer to consumers in order to maximise revenue. A simple and natural strategy is to select the best assortment out of all those that are…
The accelerated composite optimization method FISTA (Beck, Teboulle 2009) is suboptimal by a constant factor, and we present a new method OptISTA that improves FISTA by a constant factor of 2. The performance estimation problem (PEP) has…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…