Outlier detection in regression: conic quadratic formulations

In many applications, when building linear regression models, it is important to account for the presence of outliers, i.e., corrupted input data points. Such problems can be formulated as mixed-integer optimization problems involving cubic terms, each given by the product of a binary variable and a quadratic term of the continuous variables. Existing approaches in … Read more

New Formulations and Pricing Mechanisms for Stochastic Electricity Market Clearing Problem

We present new formulations of the stochastic electricity market clearing problem based on the principles of stochastic programming. Previous analyses have established that the canonical stochastic programming model effectively captures the relationship between the day-ahead and real-time dispatch and prices. The resulting quantities exhibit desirable guarantees of revenue adequacy, cost recovery, and price distortion in … Read more

Distributionally Robust Linear Quadratic Control

Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control is a fundamental control paradigm that is studied in various fields such as engineering, computer science, economics, and neuroscience. It involves controlling a system with linear dynamics and imperfect observations, subject to additive noise, with the goal of minimizing a quadratic cost function for the state and control variables. In this work, … Read more

On the Regulatory and Economic Incentives for Renewable Hybrid Power Plants in Brazil

The complementarity between renewable generation profiles has been widely explored in the literature. Notwithstanding, the regulatory and economic frameworks for hybrid power plants add interesting challenges and opportunities for investors, regulators, and planners. Focusing on the Brazilian power market, this paper proposes a unified and isonomic firm energy certificate (FEC) calculation for non-controllable renewable generators, … Read more

Safely Learning Dynamical Systems

\(\) A fundamental challenge in learning an unknown dynamical system is to reduce model uncertainty by making measurements while maintaining safety. In this work, we formulate a mathematical definition of what it means to safely learn a dynamical system by sequentially deciding where to initialize the next trajectory. In our framework, the state of the … Read more

Optimal Low-Rank Matrix Completion: Semidefinite Relaxations and Eigenvector Disjunctions

Low-rank matrix completion consists of computing a matrix of minimal complexity that recovers a given set of observations as accurately as possible. Unfortunately, existing methods for matrix completion are heuristics that, while highly scalable and often identifying high-quality solutions, do not possess any optimality guarantees. We reexamine matrix completion with an optimality-oriented eye. We reformulate … Read more

Multi-model Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

We propose a new multi-model partially observable Markov decision process (MPOMDP) model to address the issue of model ambiguity in partially observable Markov decision process. Here, model ambiguity is defined as the case where there are multiple credible optimization models with the same structure but different model parameters. The proposed MPOMDP model aims to learn … Read more

Per-RMAP: Feasibility-Seeking and Superiorization Methods for Floorplanning with I/O Assignment

The feasibility-seeking approach provides a systematic scheme to manage and solve complex constraints for continuous problems, and we explore it for the floorplanning problems with increasingly heterogeneous constraints. The classic legality constraints can be formulated as the union of convex sets. However, the convergence of conventional projection-based algorithms is not guaranteed when the constraints sets … Read more

Polynomial argmin for recovery and approximation of multivariate discontinuous functions

We propose to approximate a (possibly discontinuous) multivariate function f(x) on a compact set by the partial minimizer arg min_y p(x,y) of an appropriate polynomial p whose construction can be cast in a univariate sum of squares (SOS) framework, resulting in a highly structured convex semidefinite program. In a number of non-trivial cases (e.g. when … Read more

Bilevel optimization with a multi-objective lower-level problem: Risk-neutral and risk-averse formulations

In this work, we propose different formulations and gradient-based algorithms for deterministic and stochastic bilevel problems with conflicting objectives in the lower level. Such problems have received little attention in the deterministic case and have never been studied from a stochastic approximation viewpoint despite the recent advances in stochastic methods for single-level, bilevel, and multi-objective … Read more