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Main Authors: Bucarey, Víctor, Calderón, Sophia, Muñoz, Gonzalo, Semet, Frederic
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17640
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author Bucarey, Víctor
Calderón, Sophia
Muñoz, Gonzalo
Semet, Frederic
author_facet Bucarey, Víctor
Calderón, Sophia
Muñoz, Gonzalo
Semet, Frederic
contents Dealing with uncertainty in optimization parameters is an important and longstanding challenge. Typically, uncertain parameters are predicted accurately, and then a deterministic optimization problem is solved. However, the decisions produced by this so-called predict-then-optimize procedure can be highly sensitive to uncertain parameters. In this work, we contribute to recent efforts in producing decision-focused predictions, i.e., to build predictive models that are constructed with the goal of minimizing a regret measure on the decisions taken with them. We begin by formulating the exact expected regret minimization as a pessimistic bilevel optimization model. Then, we show computational complexity results of this problem, including its membership in NP. In combination with a known NP-hardness result, this establishes NP-completeness and discards its hardness in higher complexity classes. Using duality arguments, we reformulate it as a non-convex quadratic optimization problem. Finally, leveraging the quadratic reformulation, we show various computational techniques to achieve empirical tractability. We report extensive computational results on shortest-path and bipartite matching instances with uncertain cost vectors. Our results indicate that our approach can improve training performance over the approach of Elmachtoub and Grigas (2022), a state-of-the-art method for decision-focused learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_17640
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decision-focused predictions via pessimistic bilevel optimization: complexity and algorithms
Bucarey, Víctor
Calderón, Sophia
Muñoz, Gonzalo
Semet, Frederic
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
90C30
Dealing with uncertainty in optimization parameters is an important and longstanding challenge. Typically, uncertain parameters are predicted accurately, and then a deterministic optimization problem is solved. However, the decisions produced by this so-called predict-then-optimize procedure can be highly sensitive to uncertain parameters. In this work, we contribute to recent efforts in producing decision-focused predictions, i.e., to build predictive models that are constructed with the goal of minimizing a regret measure on the decisions taken with them. We begin by formulating the exact expected regret minimization as a pessimistic bilevel optimization model. Then, we show computational complexity results of this problem, including its membership in NP. In combination with a known NP-hardness result, this establishes NP-completeness and discards its hardness in higher complexity classes. Using duality arguments, we reformulate it as a non-convex quadratic optimization problem. Finally, leveraging the quadratic reformulation, we show various computational techniques to achieve empirical tractability. We report extensive computational results on shortest-path and bipartite matching instances with uncertain cost vectors. Our results indicate that our approach can improve training performance over the approach of Elmachtoub and Grigas (2022), a state-of-the-art method for decision-focused learning.
title Decision-focused predictions via pessimistic bilevel optimization: complexity and algorithms
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
90C30
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17640