Metrizing Fairness

We study supervised learning problems for predicting properties of individuals who belong to one of two demographic groups, and we seek predictors that are fair according to statistical parity. This means that the distributions of the predictions within the two groups should be close with respect to the Kolmogorov distance, and fairness is achieved by … Read more

Adjusted Distributionally Robust Bounds on Expected Loss Functions

Optimization problems in operations and finance often include a cost that is proportional to the expected amount by which a random variable exceeds some fixed quantity, known as the expected loss function. Representation of this function often leads to computational challenges, depending on the distribution of the random variable of interest. Moreover, in practice, a … Read more

Neur2SP: Neural Two-stage Stochastic Programming

Stochastic programming is a powerful modeling framework for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we tackle two-stage stochastic programs (2SPs), the most widely applied and studied class of stochastic programming models. Solving 2SPs exactly requires evaluation of an expected value function that is computationally intractable. Additionally, having a mixed-integer linear program (MIP) or a nonlinear … Read more

Conditional Distributionally Robust Functionals

Risk measures incorporate a conservative or risk averse perspective in decisionmaking under uncertainty. Taking a variety of models for the potential outcomes into account, the distributionally robust decision is the most conservative decision among the decisions available. This paper investigates different versions of conditional risk measures and distributionally robust functionals in a multistage setting. The … Read more

Monotonicity and Complexity of Multistage Stochastic Variational Inequalities

In this paper, we consider multistage stochastic variational inequalities (MSVIs). First, we give multistage stochastic programs and multistage multi-player noncooperative game problems as source problems. After that, we derive the monotonicity properties of MSVIs under less restrictive conditions. Finally, the polynomial rate of convergence with respect to sample sizes between the original problem and its … Read more

Robust Actionable Prescriptive Analytics

We propose a new robust actionable prescriptive analytics framework that leverages past data and side information to minimize a risk-based objective function under distributional ambiguity. Our framework aims to find a policy that directly transforms the side information into implementable decisions. Specifically, we focus on developing actionable response policies that offer the benefits of interpretability … Read more

Online Non-parametric Estimation for Nonconvex Stochastic Programming

This paper presents a fusion of Stochastic Decomposition and the Majorization-Minimization algorithm (SD-MM) to solve a class of non-convex stochastic programs. The objective function is an expectation of a smooth concave function and a second-stage linear recourse function, which is common in stochastic programming (SP). This extension not only allows new stochastic difference-of-convex (dc) functions … Read more

Capacity planning with uncertain endogenous technology learning

Optimal capacity expansion requires complex decision-making, often influenced by technology learning, which represents the reduction in expansion cost due to factors such as cumulative installed capacity. However, having perfect foresight over the technology cost reduction is highly unlikely. In this work, we develop a multistage stochastic programming framework to model capacity planning problems with endogenous … Read more

Duality in convex stochastic optimization

This paper studies duality and optimality conditions in general convex stochastic optimization problems introduced by Rockafellar and Wets in \cite{rw76}. We derive an explicit dual problem in terms of two dual variables, one of which is the shadow price of information while the other one gives the marginal cost of a perturbation much like in … Read more

Dynamic programming in convex stochastic optimization

This paper studies the dynamic programming principle for general convex stochastic optimization problems introduced by Rockafellar and Wets in the 1970s. We extend the applicability of the theory by relaxing compactness and boundedness assumptions. In the context of financial mathematics, the relaxed assumptions are satisfied under the well-known no-arbitrage condition and the reasonable asymptotic elasticity … Read more