Related papers: Rational Decisions, Random Matrices and Spin Glass…
In performative stochastic optimization, decisions can influence the distribution of random parameters, rendering the data-generating process itself decision-dependent. In practice, decision-makers rarely have access to the true…
The race to heuristically solve non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) problems through efficient methods is ongoing. Recently, optics was demonstrated as a promising tool to find the ground state of a spin-glass Ising Hamiltonian, which…
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…
Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…
We extend Robust Optimization to fractional programming, where both the objective and the constraints contain uncertain parameters. Earlier work did not consider uncertainty in both the objective and the constraints, or did not use Robust…
The central object of this PhD thesis is known under different names in the fields of computer science and statistical mechanics. In computer science, it is called the Maximum Cut problem, one of the famous twenty-one Karp's original…
Decision tree optimization is notoriously difficult from a computational perspective but essential for the field of interpretable machine learning. Despite efforts over the past 40 years, only recently have optimization breakthroughs been…
Classification and Regression Trees (CARTs) are off-the-shelf techniques in modern Statistics and Machine Learning. CARTs are traditionally built by means of a greedy procedure, sequentially deciding the splitting predictor variable(s) and…
This paper studies the robust optimal gain selection problem for financial trading systems, formulated within a \emph{double linear policy} framework, which allocates capital across long and short positions. The key objective is to…
We consider a class of production-inventory problems with box uncertainty sets from the seminal work of Ben-Tal et al. (2004) on linear decision rules in robust optimization. We prove that there always exists an optimal linear decision rule…
In economic theory, an agent chooses from available alternatives -- modeled as a set. In decisions in the field or in the lab, however, agents do not have access to the set of alternatives at once. Instead, alternatives are represented by…
Spin glass systems as lattices of disordered magnets with random interactions have important implications within the theory of magnetization and applications to a wide-range of hard combinatorial optimization problems. Nevertheless, despite…
In this paper, we examine the effect of background risk on portfolio selection and optimal reinsurance design under the criterion of maximizing the probability of reaching a goal. Following the literature, we adopt dependence uncertainty to…
Randomized optimization is an established tool for control design with modulated robustness. While for uncertain convex programs there exist randomized approaches with efficient sampling, this is not the case for non-convex problems.…
Due to an extremely rugged structure of the free energy landscape, the determination of spin-glass ground states is among the hardest known optimization problems, found to be NP-hard in the most general case. Owing to the specific structure…
We study the subtlety of optimal paternalism when a utilitarian planner has the power to design a discrete choice set for a heterogeneous population with bounded rationality. We first consider the planning problem in abstraction. We show…
Most of the analytical studies on spin glasses are performed by using mean-field theory and renormalization group analysis. Analytical studies on finite-dimensional spin glasses are very challenging. In this short note, a possible exten-…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…
The optimization of power systems involves complex uncertainties, such as technological progress, political context, geopolitical constraints. Negotiations at COP21 are complicated by the huge number of scenarios that various people want to…
Spin glasses occupy a unique place in condensed matter: they freeze collectively while remaining struc-turally disordered, and they exhibit slow, history-dependent dynamics that reflect an exceptionally rug-ged free-energy landscape. This…