Data-Driven Minimax Optimization with Expectation Constraints

Shuoguang Yang (), Xudong Li () and Guanghui Lan ()
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Shuoguang Yang: Department of Industrial Engineering & Decision Analytics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong SAR, China
Xudong Li: School of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Guanghui Lan: H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332

Operations Research, 2025, vol. 73, issue 3, 1345-1365

Abstract: Attention to data-driven optimization approaches, including the well-known stochastic gradient descent method, has grown significantly over recent decades, but data-driven constraints have rarely been studied because of the computational challenges of projections onto the feasible set defined by these hard constraints. In this paper, we focus on the nonsmooth convex-concave stochastic minimax regime and formulate the data-driven constraints as expectation constraints. The minimax expectation constrained problem subsumes a broad class of real-world applications, including data-driven robust optimization, optimization with misspecification, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) maximization with fairness constraints. We propose a class of efficient primal-dual algorithms to tackle the minimax expectation constrained problem and show that our algorithms converge at the optimal rate of O ( 1 / N ) , where N is the number of iterations. We demonstrate the practical efficiency of our algorithms by conducting numerical experiments on large-scale real-world applications.

Keywords: Optimization; stochastic optimization; minimax optimization; primal-dual methods; expectation constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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