Data-driven Prediction of Relevant Scenarios for Robust Combinatorial Optimization

We study iterative methods for (two-stage) robust combinatorial optimization problems 
with discrete uncertainty. We propose a machine-learning-based heuristic to determine 
starting scenarios that provide strong lower bounds. To this end, we design dimension-independent 
features and train a Random Forest Classifier on small-dimensional instances. Experiments 
show that our method improves the solution process for larger instances than contained 
in the training set and also provides a feature importance-score which gives insights 
into the role of scenario properties.

Article

Download

View PDF