1,446 research outputs found
A distributionally robust perspective on uncertainty quantification and chance constrained programming
The objective of uncertainty quantification is to certify that a given physical, engineering or economic system satisfies multiple safety conditions with high probability. A more ambitious goal is to actively influence the system so as to guarantee and maintain its safety, a scenario which can be modeled through a chance constrained program. In this paper we assume that the parameters of the system are governed by an ambiguous distribution that is only known to belong to an ambiguity set characterized through generalized moment bounds and structural properties such as symmetry, unimodality or independence patterns. We delineate the watershed between tractability and intractability in ambiguity-averse uncertainty quantification and chance constrained programming. Using tools from distributionally robust optimization, we derive explicit conic reformulations for tractable problem classes and suggest efficiently computable conservative approximations for intractable ones
A probabilistic interpretation of set-membership filtering: application to polynomial systems through polytopic bounding
Set-membership estimation is usually formulated in the context of set-valued
calculus and no probabilistic calculations are necessary. In this paper, we
show that set-membership estimation can be equivalently formulated in the
probabilistic setting by employing sets of probability measures. Inference in
set-membership estimation is thus carried out by computing expectations with
respect to the updated set of probability measures P as in the probabilistic
case. In particular, it is shown that inference can be performed by solving a
particular semi-infinite linear programming problem, which is a special case of
the truncated moment problem in which only the zero-th order moment is known
(i.e., the support). By writing the dual of the above semi-infinite linear
programming problem, it is shown that, if the nonlinearities in the measurement
and process equations are polynomial and if the bounding sets for initial
state, process and measurement noises are described by polynomial inequalities,
then an approximation of this semi-infinite linear programming problem can
efficiently be obtained by using the theory of sum-of-squares polynomial
optimization. We then derive a smart greedy procedure to compute a polytopic
outer-approximation of the true membership-set, by computing the minimum-volume
polytope that outer-bounds the set that includes all the means computed with
respect to P
Kernel Exponential Family Estimation via Doubly Dual Embedding
We investigate penalized maximum log-likelihood estimation for exponential
family distributions whose natural parameter resides in a reproducing kernel
Hilbert space. Key to our approach is a novel technique, doubly dual embedding,
that avoids computation of the partition function. This technique also allows
the development of a flexible sampling strategy that amortizes the cost of
Monte-Carlo sampling in the inference stage. The resulting estimator can be
easily generalized to kernel conditional exponential families. We establish a
connection between kernel exponential family estimation and MMD-GANs, revealing
a new perspective for understanding GANs. Compared to the score matching based
estimators, the proposed method improves both memory and time efficiency while
enjoying stronger statistical properties, such as fully capturing smoothness in
its statistical convergence rate while the score matching estimator appears to
saturate. Finally, we show that the proposed estimator empirically outperforms
state-of-the-artComment: 22 pages, 20 figures; AISTATS 201
Recent advances in multiobjective convex semi-infinite optimization
This paper reviews the existing literature on multiobjective (or vector) semi-infinite optimization problems, which are defined by finitely many convex objective functions of finitely many variables whose feasible sets are described by infinitely many convex constraints. The paper shows several applications of this type of optimization problems and presents a state-of-the-art review of its methods and theoretical developments (in particular, optimality, duality, and stability)
SOS-convex Semi-algebraic Programs and its Applications to Robust Optimization: A Tractable Class of Nonsmooth Convex Optimization
In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonsmooth convex functions called
SOS-convex semialgebraic functions extending the recently proposed notion of
SOS-convex polynomials. This class of nonsmooth convex functions covers many
common nonsmooth functions arising in the applications such as the Euclidean
norm, the maximum eigenvalue function and the least squares functions with
-regularization or elastic net regularization used in statistics and
compressed sensing. We show that, under commonly used strict feasibility
conditions, the optimal value and an optimal solution of SOS-convex
semi-algebraic programs can be found by solving a single semi-definite
programming problem (SDP). We achieve the results by using tools from
semi-algebraic geometry, convex-concave minimax theorem and a recently
established Jensen inequality type result for SOS-convex polynomials. As an
application, we outline how the derived results can be applied to show that
robust SOS-convex optimization problems under restricted spectrahedron data
uncertainty enjoy exact SDP relaxations. This extends the existing exact SDP
relaxation result for restricted ellipsoidal data uncertainty and answers the
open questions left in [Optimization Letters 9, 1-18(2015)] on how to recover a
robust solution from the semi-definite programming relaxation in this broader
setting
Data-Driven Robust Optimization
The last decade witnessed an explosion in the availability of data for
operations research applications. Motivated by this growing availability, we
propose a novel schema for utilizing data to design uncertainty sets for robust
optimization using statistical hypothesis tests. The approach is flexible and
widely applicable, and robust optimization problems built from our new sets are
computationally tractable, both theoretically and practically. Furthermore,
optimal solutions to these problems enjoy a strong, finite-sample probabilistic
guarantee. \edit{We describe concrete procedures for choosing an appropriate
set for a given application and applying our approach to multiple uncertain
constraints. Computational evidence in portfolio management and queuing confirm
that our data-driven sets significantly outperform traditional robust
optimization techniques whenever data is available.Comment: 38 pages, 15 page appendix, 7 figures. This version updated as of
Oct. 201
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