A study of data-driven distributionally robust optimization with incomplete joint data under finite support

Ke Ren and Hoda Bidkhori

European Journal of Operational Research, 2023, vol. 305, issue 2, 754-765

Abstract: Missing data is a common issue for many practical data-driven stochastic programming problems. The state-of-the-art approaches first estimate the missing data values and then separately solve the corresponding stochastic programming. Accurate estimation of missing values is typically inaccessible as it requires enormous data and sophisticated statistical methods. Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated approach, a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) framework, that simultaneously tackles the missing data problem and data-driven stochastic optimization by hedging against the uncertainties of the missing values. This paper adds to the DRO literature by considering the practical scenario where the data can be incomplete and partially observable; it particularly focuses on data distributions with finite support. We construct several classes of ambiguity sets for our DRO model utilizing the incomplete data sets, maximum likelihood estimation method, and different metrics. We prove the statistical consistency and finite sample guarantees of the corresponding models and provide tractable reformulations of our model for different scenarios. We perform computational studies on the multi-item inventory control problem and portfolio optimization using synthetic and real-world data. We validate that our method outperforms the traditional estimate-then-optimized approaches.

Keywords: Stochastic programming; Distributionally robust optimization; Missing data; Uncertainty modeling; Data-driven decision-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221722005070
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:305:y:2023:i:2:p:754-765

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2022.06.032

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 ().