Compressed Sensing: A Discrete Optimization Approach

We study the Compressed Sensing (CS) problem, which is the problem of finding the most sparse vector that satisfies a set of linear measurements up to some numerical tolerance. CS is a central problem in Statistics, Operations Research and Machine Learning which arises in applications such as signal processing, data compression, image reconstruction, and multi-label … Read more

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

Democratization of Complex-Problem Solving to Enhance Participation, Transparency, Accountability, and Fairness: An Optimization Perspective

Operations in critical areas of importance to society, such as healthcare, transportation and logistics, power systems, and emergency response, profoundly affect multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives. These operations are often modeled using discrete programming methods to capture the various decision-making factors through centrally-selected objectives and constraints. Unfortunately, centralized modeling and solution methodologies may overlook the … Read more

MOSDEX: A New Standard for Data Exchange with Optimization Solvers

This paper offers a new standard, called MOSDEX (Mathematical Optimization Solver Data EXchange), for managing the interaction of data with solvers for mathematical optimization. The rationale for this standard is to take advantage of modern software tools that can efficiently handle very large datasets that have become the norm for data analytics in the past … Read more

Unboundedness and Infeasibility in Linear Bilevel Optimization: How to Overcome Unbounded Relaxations

Bilevel optimization problems are known to be challenging to solve in practice. In particular, the feasible set of a bilevel problem is, in general, non-convex, even for linear bilevel problems. In this work, we aim to develop a better understanding of the feasible set of linear bilevel problems. Specifically, we develop means by which to … Read more

From the uncertainty set to the solution and back: the two stage case

Robust optimization approaches compute solutions resilient to data uncertainty, represented by a given uncertainty set. Instead, the problem of computing the largest uncertainty set that a given solution can support was, so far, quite neglected and the only results refer to the single stage framework. For that setting, it was proved that this problem can … Read more

Robust optimization: from the uncertainty set to the solution and back

So far, robust optimization have focused on computing solutions resilient to data uncertainty, given an uncertainty set representing the possible realizations of this uncertainty. Here, instead, we are interested in answering the following question: once a solution of a problem is given, which is the largest uncertainty set that this solution can support? We address … Read more

Adaptive Importance Sampling Based Surrogation Methods for Bayesian Hierarchical Models, via Logarithmic Integral Optimization

We explore Maximum a Posteriori inference of Bayesian Hierarchical Models (BHMs) with intractable normalizers, which are increasingly prevalent in contemporary applications and pose computational challenges when combined with nonconvexity and nondifferentiability. To address these, we propose the Adaptive Importance Sampling-based Surrogation method, which efficiently handles nonconvexity and nondifferentiability while improving the sampling approximation of the … Read more