Risk-Sensitive Variational Bayes: Formulations and Bounds

We study data-driven decision-making problems in a parametrized Bayesian framework. We adopt a risk-sensitive approach to modeling the interplay between statistical estimation of parameters and optimization, by computing a risk measure over a loss/disutility function with respect to the posterior distribution over the parameters. While this forms the standard Bayesian decision-theoretic approach, we focus on … Read more

Scenario Tree Reduction Methods Through Changing Node Values

To develop practical and efficient scenario tree reduction methods, we introduce a new methodology which allows for changing node values, and an easy-to-calculate distance function to measure the difference between two scenario trees. Based on minimizing the new distance, we first construct a primitive scenario tree reduction model which also minimizes the Wasserstein distance between … Read more

Quantitative Stability Analysis of Stochastic Generalized Equations

We consider the solution of a system of stochastic generalized equations (SGE) where the underlying functions are mathematical expectation of random set-valued mappings. SGE has many applications such as characterizing optimality conditions of a nonsmooth stochastic optimization problem and a stochastic equilibrium problem. We derive quantitative continuity of expected value of the set-valued mapping with … Read more

Iterative Estimation Maximization for Stochastic Linear Programs with Conditional Value-at-Risk Constraints

We present a new algorithm, Iterative Estimation Maximization (IEM), for stochastic linear programs with Conditional Value-at-Risk constraints. IEM iteratively constructs a sequence of compact-sized linear optimization problems, and solves them sequentially to find the optimal solution. The problem size IEM solves in each iteration is unaffected by the size of random samples, which makes it … Read more