Survey of Data-driven Newsvendor: Unified Analysis and Spectrum of Achievable Regrets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Zhuoxin, Ma, Will
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chen, Zhuoxin
Ma, Will
author_facet Chen, Zhuoxin
Ma, Will
contents In the Newsvendor problem, the goal is to guess the number that will be drawn from some distribution, with asymmetric consequences for guessing too high vs. too low. In the data-driven version, the distribution is unknown, and one must work with samples from the distribution. Data-driven Newsvendor has been studied under many variants: additive vs. multiplicative regret, high probability vs. expectation bounds, and different distribution classes. This paper studies all combinations of these variants, filling in many gaps in the literature and simplifying many proofs. In particular, we provide a unified analysis based on the notion of clustered distributions, which in conjunction with our new lower bounds, shows that the entire spectrum of regrets between $1/\sqrt{n}$ and $1/n$ can be possible. Simulations on commonly-used distributions demonstrate that our notion is the "correct" predictor of empirical regret across varying data sizes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_03505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Survey of Data-driven Newsvendor: Unified Analysis and Spectrum of Achievable Regrets
Chen, Zhuoxin
Ma, Will
Machine Learning
In the Newsvendor problem, the goal is to guess the number that will be drawn from some distribution, with asymmetric consequences for guessing too high vs. too low. In the data-driven version, the distribution is unknown, and one must work with samples from the distribution. Data-driven Newsvendor has been studied under many variants: additive vs. multiplicative regret, high probability vs. expectation bounds, and different distribution classes. This paper studies all combinations of these variants, filling in many gaps in the literature and simplifying many proofs. In particular, we provide a unified analysis based on the notion of clustered distributions, which in conjunction with our new lower bounds, shows that the entire spectrum of regrets between $1/\sqrt{n}$ and $1/n$ can be possible. Simulations on commonly-used distributions demonstrate that our notion is the "correct" predictor of empirical regret across varying data sizes.
title Survey of Data-driven Newsvendor: Unified Analysis and Spectrum of Achievable Regrets
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03505