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Reliability analysis is a sub-field of uncertainty quantification that assesses the probability of a system performing as intended under various uncertainties. Traditionally, this analysis relies on deterministic models, where experiments…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-19 Anderson V. Pires , Maliki Moustapha , Stefano Marelli , Bruno Sudret

Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-05 Peter D. Tonner , Daniel V. Samarov , A. Gilad Kusne

In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-01 Raghu Bollapragada , Richard Byrd , Jorge Nocedal

We discuss a general approach to building non-asymptotic confidence bounds for stochastic optimization problems. Our principal contribution is the observation that a Sample Average Approximation of a problem supplies upper and lower bounds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-13 Vincent Guigues , Anatoli Juditsky , Arkadi Nemirovski

Assessing sampling uncertainty in extremum estimation can be challenging when the asymptotic variance is not analytically tractable. Bootstrap inference offers a feasible solution but can be computationally costly especially when the model…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-09-15 Jean-Jacques Forneron , Serena Ng

This paper introduces a local optimization-based approach to test statistical hypotheses and to construct confidence intervals. This approach can be viewed as an extension of bootstrap, and yields asymptotically valid tests and confidence…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-04-21 Shifeng Xiong

We consider a distributionally robust formulation of stochastic optimization problems arising in statistical learning, where robustness is with respect to uncertainty in the underlying data distribution. Our formulation builds on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-09 Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Andrzej Ruszczyński , Landi Zhu

Confidence sets play a fundamental role in statistical inference. In this paper, we consider confidence intervals for high dimensional linear regression with random design. We first establish the convergence rates of the minimax expected…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-11-30 T. Tony Cai , Zijian Guo

Optimal values and solutions of empirical approximations of stochastic optimization problems can be viewed as statistical estimators of their true values. From this perspective, it is important to understand the asymptotic behavior of these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Johannes Milz , Thomas M. Surowiec

The last decade witnessed an explosion in the availability of data for operations research applications. Motivated by this growing availability, we propose a novel schema for utilizing data to design uncertainty sets for robust optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-11-25 Dimitris Bertsimas , Vishal Gupta , Nathan Kallus

A common goal in statistics and machine learning is estimation of unknowns. Point estimates alone are of little value without an accompanying measure of uncertainty, but traditional uncertainty quantification methods, such as confidence…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-12 Neil Dey , Ryan Martin , Jonathan P. Williams

This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-12 Chenglong Bao , Yancheng Yuan , Shulan Zhu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn , Wenhao Yang

This paper develops inferential methods for a very general class of ill-posed models in econometrics encompassing the nonparametric instrumental variable regression, various functional regressions, and the density deconvolution. We focus on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-22 Andrii Babii

The non-convexity and intractability of distributionally robust chance constraints make them challenging to cope with. From a data-driven perspective, we propose formulating it as a robust optimization problem to ensure that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-23 Zhiping Chen , Wentao Ma , Bingbing Ji

We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…

Stochastic simulation aims to compute output performance for complex models that lack analytical tractability. To ensure accurate prediction, the model needs to be calibrated and validated against real data. Conventional methods approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-28 Yuanlu Bai , Tucker Balch , Haoxian Chen , Danial Dervovic , Henry Lam , Svitlana Vyetrenko

We consider the optimization of an uncertain objective over continuous and multi-dimensional decision spaces in problems in which we are only provided with observational data. We propose a novel algorithmic framework that is tractable,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Dimitris Bertsimas , Christopher McCord

We propose a data-driven technique to automatically learn contextual uncertainty sets in robust optimization, resulting in excellent worst-case and average-case performance while also guaranteeing constraint satisfaction. Our method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-25 Irina Wang , Bart Van Parys , Bartolomeo Stellato

This paper tackles challenges in pricing and revenue projections due to consumer uncertainty. We propose a novel data-based approach for firms facing unknown consumer type distributions. Unlike existing methods, we assume firms only observe…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-28 Duarte Gonçalves , Bruno A. Furtado