Weijun Xie A traditional stochastic program under a finite population typically seeks to optimize efficiency by maximizing the expected profits or minimizing the expected costs, subject to a set of constraints. However, implementing such optimization-based decisions can have varying impacts on individuals, and when assessed using the individuals’ utility functions, these impacts may differ substantially across demographic … Read more
Distributionally Favorable Optimization (DFO) is an important framework for decision-making under uncertainty, with applications across fields such as reinforcement learning, online learning, robust statistics, chance-constrained programming, and two-stage stochastic optimization without relatively complete recourse. In contrast to the traditional Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) paradigm, DFO presents a unique challenge– the application of the inner infimum … Read more
The classical Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) identifies the correlations between two sets of multivariate variables based on their covariance, which has been widely applied in diverse fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and speech analysis. Despite its popularity, CCA can encounter challenges in explaining correlations between two variable sets within high-dimensional data contexts. … Read more
We present a novel approach aimed at enhancing the efficacy of solving both regular and distributionally robust chance constrained programs using an empirical reference distribution. In general, these programs can be reformulated as mixed-integer programs (MIPs) by introducing binary variables for each scenario, indicating whether a scenario should be satisfied. While existing methods have predominantly … Read more
A Low-rank Spectral Optimization Problem (LSOP) minimizes a linear objective subject to multiple two-sided linear matrix inequalities intersected with a low-rank and spectral constrained domain set. Although solving LSOP is, in general, NP-hard, its partial convexification (i.e., replacing the domain set by its convex hull) termed “LSOP-R”, is often tractable and yields a high-quality solution. … Read more
This paper studies distributionally robust chance constrained programs (DRCCPs), where the uncertain constraints must be satisfied with at least a probability of a prespecified threshold for all probability distributions from the Wasserstein ambiguity set. As DRCCPs are often nonconvex and challenging to solve optimally, researchers have been developing various convex inner approximations. Recently, ALSO-X has … Read more
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging air transportation mode to alleviate the ground traffic burden and achieve zero direct aviation emissions. Due to the potential economic scaling effects, the UAM traffic flow is expected to increase dramatically once implemented, and its market can be substantially large. To be prepared for the era of UAM, … Read more
In the rank-constrained optimization problem (RCOP), it minimizes a linear objective function over a prespecified closed rank-constrained domain set and $m$ generic two-sided linear matrix inequalities. Motivated by the Dantzig-Wolfe (DW) decomposition, a popular approach of solving many nonconvex optimization problems, we investigate the strength of DW relaxation (DWR) of the RCOP, which admits the … Read more
We study the D-optimal Data Fusion (DDF) problem, which aims to select new data points, given an existing Fisher information matrix, so as to maximize the logarithm of the determinant of the overall Fisher information matrix. We show that the DDF problem is NP-hard and has no constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithm unless P = NP. … Read more