An Empirical Quantile Estimation Approach to Nonlinear Optimization Problems with Chance Constraints

TL;DR

This paper presents an empirical quantile estimation method for solving chance-constrained nonlinear optimization problems, offering a convergence theory and advantages over smoothing-based approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a non-smoothing empirical quantile approach with convergence guarantees, simplifying gradient estimation in chance-constrained optimization.

Findings

The method converges under certain conditions.

It outperforms smoothing methods in ease of implementation.

Numerical results show competitive performance.

Abstract

We investigate an empirical quantile estimation approach to solve chance-constrained nonlinear optimization problems. Our approach is based on the reformulation of the chance constraint as an equivalent quantile constraint to provide stronger signals on the gradient. In this approach, the value of the quantile function is estimated empirically from samples drawn from the random parameters, and the gradient of the quantile function is estimated via a finite-difference approximation on top of the quantile-function-value estimation. We establish a convergence theory of this approach within the framework of an augmented Lagrangian method for solving general nonlinear constrained optimization problems. The foundation of the convergence analysis is a concentration property of the empirical quantile process, and the analysis is divided based on whether or not the quantile function is differentiable. In contrast to the sampling-and-smoothing approach used in the literature, the method developed in this paper does not involve any smoothing function and hence the quantile-function gradient approximation is easier to implement and there are less accuracy-control parameters to tune. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and compare it with a smoothing method for the quantile-gradient estimation. Numerical investigation shows that the two approaches are competitive for certain problem instances.