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Dimension Reduction of Distributionally Robust Optimization Problems

Published: April 8, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2504.06381v2

By: Brandon Tam, Silvana M. Pesenti

Potential Business Impact:

Simplifies hard math problems with many parts.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with uncertainty sets consisting of high-dimensional random vectors that are close in the multivariate Wasserstein distance to a reference random vector. We give conditions under which the images of these sets under scalar-valued aggregation functions are equal to or bounded by uncertainty sets of univariate random variables defined via a univariate Wasserstein distance. This allows us to rewrite or bound high-dimensional DRO problems with simpler DRO problems over the space of univariate random variables. We generalize the results to uncertainty sets defined via the Bregman-Wasserstein divergence and the max-sliced Wasserstein and Bregman-Wasserstein divergence. The max-sliced divergences allow us to jointly model distributional uncertainty around the reference random vector and uncertainty in the aggregation function. Finally, we derive explicit bounds for worst-case risk measures that belong to the class of signed Choquet integrals.

Country of Origin
🇨🇦 Canada

Page Count
43 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Optimization and Control