Data-Driven Conditional Robust Optimization

In this paper, we study a novel approach for data-driven decision-making under uncertainty in the presence of contextual information. Specifically, we address this problem using a new Conditional Robust Optimization (CRO) paradigm that seeks the solution of a robust optimization problem where the uncertainty set accounts for the most recent side information provided by a set of covariates. We propose an integrated framework that designs the conditional uncertainty set by jointly learning a partition in the covariate data space and simultaneously constructing region specific deep uncertainty sets for the random vector that perturbs the CRO problem. We also provide theoretical guarantees for the coverage provided by conditional uncertainty sets and for the value-at-risk performances obtained using the proposed CRO model. Finally, we use simulated and real world data to illustrate the implementation of our approach and compare it against two non-contextual robust optimization benchmark approaches to demonstrate the value of exploiting contextual information in robust optimization.