Jie Wang

Contextual Distributionally Robust Optimization with Causal and Continuous Structure: An Interpretable and Tractable Approach

  • Jie Wang
    • Categories Optimization in Data Science, Robust Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags ,

    In this paper, we introduce a framework for contextual distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that considers the causal and continuous structure of the underlying distribution by developing interpretable and tractable decision rules that prescribe decisions using covariates. We first introduce the causal Sinkhorn discrepancy (CSD), an entropy-regularized causal Wasserstein distance that encourages continuous transport plans while … Read more

    Iterative Sampling Methods for Sinkhorn Distributionally Robust Optimization

  • Jie Wang
    • Categories Infinite Dimensional Optimization, Optimization in Data Science, Robust Optimization

    Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for reliable decision-making under uncertainty. This paper focuses on DRO with ambiguity sets defined via the Sinkhorn discrepancy: an entropy-regularized Wasserstein distance, referred to as Sinkhorn DRO. Existing work primarily addresses Sinkhorn DRO from a dual perspective, leveraging its formulation as a conditional stochastic optimization … Read more

    Statistical and Computational Guarantees of Kernel Max-Sliced Wasserstein Distances

  • Jie Wang
    • Categories Optimization in Data Science Tags , ,

    Optimal transport has been very successful for various machine learning tasks; however, it is known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Hence, dimensionality reduction is desirable when applied to high-dimensional data with low-dimensional structures. The kernel max-sliced~(KMS) Wasserstein distance is developed for this purpose by finding an optimal nonlinear mapping that reduces data into … Read more

    Variable Selection for Kernel Two-Sample Tests

  • Jie Wang
  • Santanu S. Dey
  • Yao Xie
    • Categories (Mixed) Integer Nonlinear Programming, Optimization in Data Science Tags , ,

    We consider the variable selection problem for two-sample tests, aiming to select the most informative variables to determine whether two collections of samples follow the same distribution. To address this, we propose a novel framework based on the kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). Our approach seeks a subset of variables with a pre-specified size that … Read more

    Sinkhorn Distributionally Robust Optimization

  • Jie Wang
  • Rui Gao
  • Yao Xie
    • Categories Infinite Dimensional Optimization, Robust Optimization, Stochastic Programming

    We study distributionally robust optimization with Sinkhorn distance—a variant of Wasserstein distance based on entropic regularization. We derive a convex programming dual reformulation for general nominal distributions, transport costs, and loss functions. To solve the dual reformulation, we develop a stochastic mirror descent algorithm with biased subgradient estimators and derive its computational complexity guarantees. Finally, … Read more