Non-asymptotic confidence bounds for the optimal value of a stochastic program

We discuss a general approach to building non-asymptotic confidence bounds for stochastic optimization problems. Our principal contribution is the observation that a Sample Average Approximation of a problem supplies upper and lower bounds for the optimal value of the problem which are essentially better than the quality of the corresponding optimal solutions. At the same time, such bounds are more reliable than "standard" confidence bounds obtained through the asymptotic approach. We also discuss bounding the optimal value of MinMax Stochastic Optimization and stochastically constrained problems. We conclude with a simulation study illustrating the numerical behavior of the proposed bounds

Asymptotic properties of stochastic population dynamics

In this paper we stochastically perturb the classical Lotka{Volterra model x_ (t) = diag(x1(t); ; xn(t))[b + Ax(t)] into the stochastic dierential equation dx(t) = diag(x1(t); ; xn(t))[(b + Ax(t))dt + dw(t)]: The main aim is to study the asymptotic properties of the solution. It is known (see e.g. [3, 20]) if the noise is too large then the population may become extinct with probability one. Our main aim here is to nd out what happens if the noise is relatively small. In this paper we will establish some new asymptotic properties for the moments as well as for the sample paths of the solution. In particular, we will discuss the limit of the average in time of the sample paths