Sufficient Decision Proxies for Decision-Focused Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Schutte, Noah, Veviurko, Grigorii, Postek, Krzysztof, Yorke-Smith, Neil
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Schutte, Noah
Veviurko, Grigorii
Postek, Krzysztof
Yorke-Smith, Neil
author_facet Schutte, Noah
Veviurko, Grigorii
Postek, Krzysztof
Yorke-Smith, Neil
contents When solving optimization problems under uncertainty with contextual data, utilizing machine learning to predict the uncertain parameters' values is a popular and effective approach. Decision-focused learning (DFL) aims at learning a predictive model such that decision quality, instead of prediction accuracy, is maximized. Common practice is to predict a single scenario representing the uncertain parameters, implicitly assuming that there exists a deterministic problem approximation (proxy) that allows for optimal decision-making. The opposite has also been considered, where the underlying distribution is estimated with a parameterized distribution. However, little is known about when either choice is valid. This paper investigates for the first time problem properties that justify using a certain decision proxy. Using this, we present alternative decision proxies for DFL, with little or no compromise on the complexity of the learning task. We show the effectiveness of presented approaches in experiments on continuous and discrete problems, as well as problems with uncertainty in the objective function and in the constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sufficient Decision Proxies for Decision-Focused Learning
Schutte, Noah
Veviurko, Grigorii
Postek, Krzysztof
Yorke-Smith, Neil
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
When solving optimization problems under uncertainty with contextual data, utilizing machine learning to predict the uncertain parameters' values is a popular and effective approach. Decision-focused learning (DFL) aims at learning a predictive model such that decision quality, instead of prediction accuracy, is maximized. Common practice is to predict a single scenario representing the uncertain parameters, implicitly assuming that there exists a deterministic problem approximation (proxy) that allows for optimal decision-making. The opposite has also been considered, where the underlying distribution is estimated with a parameterized distribution. However, little is known about when either choice is valid. This paper investigates for the first time problem properties that justify using a certain decision proxy. Using this, we present alternative decision proxies for DFL, with little or no compromise on the complexity of the learning task. We show the effectiveness of presented approaches in experiments on continuous and discrete problems, as well as problems with uncertainty in the objective function and in the constraints.
title Sufficient Decision Proxies for Decision-Focused Learning
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03953