EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Gradient-based simulation optimization under probability constraints

Laetitia Andrieu, Guy Cohen and Felisa J. Vázquez-Abad

European Journal of Operational Research, 2011, vol. 212, issue 2, 345-351

Abstract: We study optimization problems subject to possible fatal failures. The probability of failure should not exceed a given confidence level. The distribution of the failure event is assumed unknown, but it can be generated via simulation or observation of historical data. Gradient-based simulation-optimization methods pose the difficulty of the estimation of the gradient of the probability constraint under no knowledge of the distribution. In this work we provide two single-path estimators with bias: a convolution method and a finite difference, and we provide a full analysis of convergence of the Arrow-Hurwicz algorithm, which we use as our solver for optimization. Convergence results are used to tune the parameters of the numerical algorithms in order to achieve best convergence rates, and numerical results are included via an example of application in finance.

Keywords: Probability; constraints; Stochastic; gradient; algorithm; Stochastic; approximation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(11)00103-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:212:y:2011:i:2:p:345-351

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:212:y:2011:i:2:p:345-351