Abstract
Forecasting and optimisation are two major fields of operations research that are utilised to deal with uncertainties and to make the best decisions. These methods are widely used in academia and practice and have contributed to each other growth in several ways. These methods can be used together to solve various problems in transportation, scheduling, production planning, and energy where both forecasting and optimisation are needed. However, the nature of the relationship between these two methods and how they can be integrated for better performance have not been explored or understood enough. We advocate the integration of these two methods and explore several problems that require both forecasting and optimisation. I will investigate some of the methodologies that lie at the intersection of machine learning with forecasting and optimisation to address real-world problems. I will provide several research directions and use cases for researchers and practitioners interested to explore this interesting arena.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In this study, we use forecasting and predictive analytics as interchangeable words. Similarly, (constrained) optimisation, and prescriptive analytics are used as interchangeable words.
References
Abolghasemi, M., Abbasi, B. & HosseiniFard, Z. (2023). Machine learning for satisficing operational decision making: A case study in blood supply chain, International Journal Forecasting.
Abolghasemi, M., & Bean, R. (2022). How to predict and optimise with asymmetric error metrics. GitHub, Preprint.
Abolghasemi, M., & Esmaeilbeigi, R. (2021). State-of-the-art predictive and prescriptive analytics for IEEE CIS 3rd Technical Challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.03595
Bello, I., Pham, H., Le, Q. V., Norouzi, M., & Bengio, S. (2021). Neural combinatorial optimization with reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.09940
Bertsimas, D., & Dunn, J. (2017). Optimal classification trees. Machine Learning, 106(7), 1039–1082.
Bertsimas, D., & Dunn, J. (2019). Machine learning under a modern optimization lens. Dynamic Ideas LLC.
Bertsimas, D., & Kallus, N. (2020, March). From predictive to prescriptive analytics. Management Science, 66(3), 1025–1044.
Brys, T., Harutyunyan, A., Taylor, M. E., & Nowe, A. (2015). Policy transfer using reward shaping. In AAMAS (pp. 181–188).
Cappart, Q., Chetelat, D., Khalil, E., Lodi, A., Morris, C., & Veličković, P. (2021). Combinatorial optimization and reasoning with graph neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.09544
Chatzos, M., Fioretto, F., Mak, T. W. K., & Van Hentenryck, P. (2020). High-fidelity machine learning approximations of large-scale optimal power flow. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.16356
Dai, H., Khalil, E. B., Zhang, Y., Dilkina, B., & Song, L. (2017). Learning combinatorial optimization algorithms over graphs. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.
De Raedt, L., Passerini, A., & Teso, S. (2018). Learning constraints from examples. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 32, No. 1).
Demirović, E., Stuckey, P. J., Bailey, J., Chan, J., Leckie, C., Ramamohanarao, K., & Guns, T. (2019). An investigation into prediction+ optimisation for the knapsack problem. In International Conference on Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research (pp. 241–257). Springer.
Detassis, F., Lombardi, M., & Milano, M. (2021). Teaching the old dog new tricks: Supervised learning with constraints. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 3742–3749).
Donti, P., Amos, B., & Zico Kolter, J. (2017). Task-based end-to-end model learning in stochastic optimization. In Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.
Donti, P. L., Rolnick, D., & Zico Kolter, J. (2021). Dc3: A learning method for optimization with hard constraints. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12225
Elmachtoub, A., Cheuk Nam Liang, J., & McNellis, R. (2020). Decision trees for decision-making under the predict-then-optimize framework. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 2858–2867). PMLR.
Elmachtoub, A. N., & Grigas, P. (2022). Smart “predict, then optimize”. Management Science, 68(1), 9–26.
Fioretto, F., Van Hentenryck, P., Mak, T. W. K., Tran, C., Baldo, F., & Lombardi, M. (2020a). Lagrangian duality for constrained deep learning. In Joint European conference on machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases (pp. 118–135). Springer.
Fioretto, F., Van Hentenryck, P., Mak, T. W. K., Tran, C., Baldo, F., & Lombardi, M. (2020b). A lagrangian dual framework for deep neural networks with constraints optimization. In European conference on machine learning and principles and practice of knowledge discovery in databases (ECML-PKDD). Vol. 12461. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 118–135). Springer.
Goodwin, P. (2009). Common sense and hard decision analysis: Why might they conflict? Management Decision, 47(3), 427–440.
Guo, Z. X., Wong, W. K., & Li, M. (2013). A multivariate intelligent decisionmaking model for retail sales forecasting. Decision Support Systems, 55(1), 247–255.
He, H., Daume III, H., & Eisner, J. M. (2014). Learning to search in branch and bound algorithms. Advances in neural information processing systems, 27.
Hussein, A., Gaber, M. M., Elyan, E., & Jayne, C. (2017, April). Imitation learning: A survey of learning methods. ACM Computing Surveys, 50(2), 1–35.
Khalil, E., Le Bodic, P., Song, L., Nemhauser, G., & Dilkina, B. (2016, February). Learning to branch in mixed integer programming. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 30, No. 1).
Kotary, J., Fioretto, F., Van Hentenryck, P., & Wilder, B. (2021). End-to-end constrained optimization learning: A survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16378
Larsen, E., Lachapelle, S., Bengio, Y., Frejinger, E., Lacoste-Julien, S., & Lodi, A. (2022). Predicting tactical solutions to operational planning problems under imperfect information. Informs Journal on Computing, 34(1), 227–242.
Mandi, J., Bucarey, V., Tchomba, M. M. K., & Guns, T. (2022). Decision-focused learning: Through the lens of learning to rank. In International conference on machine learning (pp. 14935–14947). PMLR.
Mandi, J., Stuckey, P. J., Guns, T., et al. (2020). Smart predict-and-optimize for hard combinatorial optimization problems. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 1603–1610).
Marcos Alvarez, A., Wehenkel, L., & Louveaux, Q. (2015). Machine learning to balance the load in parallel branch-and-bound.
Mazyavkina, N., Sviridov, S., Ivanov, S., & Burnaev, E. (2021). Reinforcement learning for combinatorial optimization: A survey. Computers & Operations Research, 134, 105400.
Mulamba, M., Mandi, J., Diligenti, M., Lombardi, M., Bucarey, V., & Guns, T. (2021). Contrastive losses and solution caching for predict-and-optimize. In Proceedings of the thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21).
Popescu, A., Polat-Erdeniz, S., Felfernig, A., Uta, M., Atas, M., Le, V-M., Pilsl, K., Enzelsberger, M., & Tran, T. N. T. (2022, February). An overview of machine learning techniques in constraint solving. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 58(1), 91–118.
Shah, S., Wilder, B., Perrault, A., & Tambe, M. (2022). Learning (local) surrogate loss functions for predict-then-optimize problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.16067.
Shen, Y., Sun, Y., Li, X., Eberhard, A., & Ernst, A. (2023). Adaptive solution prediction for combinatorial optimization. European Journal of Operational Research, 309(3), 1392–1408.
Silver, D., Huang, A., Maddison, C. J., Guez, A., Sifre, L., van den Driessche, G., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Panneershelvam, V., Lanctot, M., Dieleman, S., Grewe, D., Nham, J., Kalchbrenner, N., Sutskever, I., Lillicrap, T., Leach, M., Kavukcuoglu, K., Graepel, T., & Hassabis, D. (2016, January). Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search. Nature, 529(7587), 484–489.
Syntetos, A. A., Nikolopoulos, K., & Boylan, J. E. (2010). Judging the judges through accuracy-implication metrics: The case of inventory forecasting. International Journal of Forecasting, 26(1), 134–143.
Tran, C., Fioretto, F., & Van Hentenryck, P. (2021, May). Differentially private and fair deep learning: A lagrangian dual approach. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 35, No. 11, pp. 9932–9939).
Vinyals, O., Fortunato, M., & Jaitly, N. (2015). Pointer networks. Advances in neural information processing systems, 28.
Wilder, B., Dilkina, B., & Tambe, M. (2019, July). Melding the data-decisions pipeline: Decision-focused learning for combinatorial optimization. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 1658–1665).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Abolghasemi, M. (2023). The Intersection of Machine Learning with Forecasting and Optimisation: Theory and Applications. In: Hamoudia, M., Makridakis, S., Spiliotis, E. (eds) Forecasting with Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave Advances in the Economics of Innovation and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35879-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35879-1_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-35878-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-35879-1
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)