Related papers: PASTA: Pessimistic Assortment Optimization
The optimal allocation of assets has been widely discussed with the theoretical analysis of risk measures, and pessimism is one of the most attractive approaches beyond the conventional optimal portfolio model. The $\alpha$-risk plays a…
Offline model-based optimization (MBO) seeks to discover high-performing designs using only a fixed dataset of past evaluations. Most existing methods rely on learning a surrogate model via regression and implicitly assume that good…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy based on a dataset collected a priori. Due to the lack of further interactions with the environment, offline RL suffers from the insufficient coverage of…
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…
Bin packing is a classic optimization problem with a wide range of applications, from load balancing to supply chain management. In this work, we study the online variant of the problem, in which a sequence of items of various sizes must be…
We study the assortment optimization problem under general linear constraints, where the customer choice behavior is captured by the Cross-Nested Logit model. In this problem, there is a set of products organized into multiple subsets (or…
Bin packing is an algorithmic problem that arises in diverse applications such as remnant inventory systems, shipping logistics, and appointment scheduling. In its simplest variant, a sequence of $T$ items (e.g., orders for raw material,…
In this note, we propose a FISTA-type first order algorithm, VAR-FISTA, to solve a composite optimization problem. A distinctive feature of VAR-FISTA is its ability to exploit the convexity of the function in the problem, resulting in an…
Most work on sequential learning assumes a fixed set of actions that are available all the time. However, in practice, actions can consist of picking subsets of readings from sensors that may break from time to time, road segments that can…
The state transition algorithm (STA), as an intelligent optimization method grounded in constructivist learning, has been demonstrated to be highly effective in solving complex optimization problems. However, the standard STA suffers from…
Motivated by e-commerce, we study the online assortment optimization problem. The seller offers an assortment, i.e. a subset of products, to each arriving customer, who then purchases one or no product from her offered assortment. A…
Semi-online algorithms that are allowed to perform a bounded amount of repacking achieve guaranteed good worst-case behaviour in a more realistic setting. Most of the previous works focused on minimization problems that aim to minimize some…
We consider an assortment optimization problem where a customer chooses a single item from a sequence of sets shown to her, while limited inventories constrain the items offered to customers over time. In the special case where all of the…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…
We study online assortment optimization under stochastic choice when a decision maker simultaneously values cumulative revenue performance and the quality of post-hoc inference on revenue contrasts. We analyze a forced-exploration…
The blessing of ubiquitous data also comes with a curse: the communication, storage, and labeling of massive, mostly redundant datasets. We seek to solve this problem at its core, collecting only valuable data and throwing out the rest via…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to learn an optimal policy from a dataset collected by a behavior policy which possibly depends on the latent state. Such…
We develop a stochastic inventory system which accounts for the limited patience of backlogged customers. While limited patience is a feature that is closer to the nature of unmet demand, our model also unifies the classic backlogging and…
The goal in offline data-driven decision-making is synthesize decisions that optimize a black-box utility function, using a previously-collected static dataset, with no active interaction. These problems appear in many forms: offline…
This paper considers a class of real-time stochastic optimization problems dependent on an unknown probability distribution. In the considered scenario, data is streaming frequently while trying to reach a decision. Thus, we aim to devise a…