Scenario trees and policy selection for multistage stochastic programming using machine learning

Stochastic optimization using scenario trees has proven to be a powerful algorithmic strategy, but has suffered from the rapid growth in the size of scenario trees as the number of stages grows (Birge and Louveaux, 1997; Shapiro et al., 2009). A number of authors have undertaken research to limit the size of the scenario tree, but problem size still grows exponentially with the number of stages (Frauendorfer, 1996; Dupacova et al., 2000; Høyland and Wallace, 2001; Pennanen, 2009; Heitsch and Römisch, 2009). As a result, most authors either severely limit the number of decision stages or sharply limit the number of scenarios per stage (Birge, 1997; Wallace and Ziemba, 2005; Dempster et al., 2008; Kallrath et al., 2009). Such approximations make it possible to optimize first-stage decisions with a stochastic look-ahead, but without tight guarantees on the value of the computed decisions for the true multistage problem (as a matter of fact, bounding techniques also tend to break down on problems with many stages). Some authors have proposed to assess the quality of scenario-tree based methods by outof-sample validation (Kouwenberg, 2001; Chiralaksanakul, 2003; Hilli and Pennanen, 2008). The validation scheme consists of solving the multistage program posed on a scenario tree spanning the planning horizon T, implementing the decision relative to time step 1, sampling the realization of the stochastic process at time 1, updating the conditional distributions of the stochastic process from time 2 to time T, rebuilding a scenario tree spanning time periods 2 to T, solving the new multistage program over the remaining horizon (with previously 1 implemented decisions fixed to their value), and continuing this process until the last decision at time T has been found.