In recent years, automated data-driven decision-making systems have enjoyed a tremendous success in a variety of fields (e.g., to make product recommendations, or to guide the production of entertainment). More recently, these algorithms are increasingly being used to assist socially sensitive decisionmaking (e.g., to decide who to admit into a degree program or to prioritize individuals for public housing). Yet, these automated tools may result in discriminative decision-making in the sense that they may treat individuals unfairly or unequally based on membership to a category or a minority, resulting in disparate treatment or disparate impact and violating both moral and ethical standards. This may happen when the training dataset is itself biased (e.g., if individuals belonging to a particular group have historically been discriminated upon). However, it may also happen when the training dataset is unbiased, if the errors made by the system affect individuals belonging to a category or minority differently (e.g., if misclassification rates for Blacks are higher than for Whites). In this paper, we unify the definitions of unfairness across classification and regression. We propose a versatile mixed-integer optimization framework for learning optimal and fair decision trees and variants thereof to prevent disparate treatment and/or disparate impact as appropriate. This translates to a flexible schema for designing fair and interpretable policies suitable for socially sensitive decision-making. We conduct extensive computational studies that show that our framework improves the state-of-the-art in the field (which typically relies on heuristics) to yield non-discriminative decisions at lower cost to overall accuracy.
We propose a tractable approximation scheme for convex (not necessarily linear) multi-stage robust optimization problems. We approximate the adaptive decisions by finite linear combinations of prescribed basis functions and demonstrate how one can optimize over these decision rules at low computational cost through constraint randomization. We obtain a-priori probabilistic guarantees on the feasibility properties of the optimal decision rule by extending existing constraint sampling techniques from the single-to the multi-stage case. We demonstrate that for a suitable choice of basis functions, the approximation converges as the size of the basis and the number of sampled constraints tend to infinity. The approach yields an algorithm parameterized in the basis size, the probability of constraint violation and the confidence that this probability will not be exceeded. These three parameters serve to tune the trade-off between optimality and feasibility of the decision rules and the computational cost of the algorithm. We assess the convergence and scalability properties of our approach in the context of two inventory management problems.
Stochastic programming and robust optimization are disciplines concerned with optimal decision-making under uncertainty over time. Traditional models and solution algorithms have been tailored to problems where the order in which the uncertainties unfold is independent of the controller actions. Nevertheless, in numerous real-world decision problems, the time of information discovery can be influenced by the decision maker, and uncertainties only become observable following an (often costly) investment. Such problems can be formulated as mixed-binary multi-stage stochastic programs with decisiondependent non-anticipativity constraints. Unfortunately, these problems are severely computationally intractable. We propose an approximation scheme for multi-stage problems with decision-dependent information discovery which is based on techniques commonly used in modern robust optimization. In particular, we obtain a conservative approximation in the form of a mixed-binary linear program by restricting the spaces of measurable binary and real-valued decision rules to those that are representable as piecewise constant and linear functions of the uncertain parameters, respectively. We assess our approach on a problem of infrastructure and production planning in offshore oil fields from the literature.Index Terms-endogenous uncertainty, binary decision rules.
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