saitcakmak/borisk

Bayesian Optimization of Risk Measures

BoRisk - Bayesian Optimization of Risk Measures

[S. Cakmak, R. Astudillo, P. Frazier, and E. Zhou. Bayesian Optimization of Risk Measures. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33, 2020.] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.05554)

@inproceedings{cakmak2020borisk,
  title={Bayesian Optimization of Risk Measures},
  author={Cakmak, Sait and Astudillo, Raul and Frazier, Peter and Zhou, Enlu},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33},
  year={2020},
  url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.05554}
}

Archival Notice / Recommended Usage:

Risk measures have been upstreamed to BoTorch. To take advantage of the recent improvements in the upstream packages and avoid backcompatibility issues, we recommend using the BoTorch implementations of risk measures instead. Tutorial notebooks demonstrating optimization of risk measures in native BoTorch can be found here and here.

Setup:

Within a virtual environment;

Install the requirements, i.e., pip install -r requirements.txt

Install the package locally, i.e, pip install -e .

You can now use import BoRisk or from BoRisk import ... to access the package contents as usual.

Usage:

Please see tutorial.ipynb for an overview of how to use exp_loop to run experiments.

It is highly recommended to define the problem function in test_functions, and use it by adding it to the list of functions in function_picker which runs it through StandardizedFunction to project the domain to the unit hypercube.

The most convenient way is to run the experiments using exp_loop which uses the Experiment class and does error handling, saves the output, and reads the existing output to recover an experiment that was killed for whatever reason. We note that the estimation of the posterior objective is expensive, thus it is highly recommended to use rhoKGapx algorithm, and small number of fantasies and optimization parameters.

Our implementation supports non-standard data types and GPU acceleration, which can be specified by passing, e.g., dtype = torch.double and device = "cuda" to the Experiment. We observed that using dtype = torch.double helps with numerical issues, e.g., in Cholesky decomposition, but comes with a slight increase in computational cost (< 1.5x). We also observed that the use of GPUs results in modest speed up (~1.5-2x), so it is recommended to utilize this option when available.

Legend:

• batch_output/: stores the combined experiment output to be used with *_analyzer.py in helper_fns to produce the plots presented in the paper

• exp_output/: stores the raw experiment output. Each algorithm run is saved as a separate output file that can be used to reconstruct an iteration or continue the experiment for additional iterations if needed.

• helper_fns/: A collection of code that is used for analyzing & plotting the output, and various other tasks. Warning: Some scripts here may not be up to date.

• runner_files/: the scripts used for running the experiments presented in the paper (and some experimental ones).

• BoRisk/test_functions/: this is where the problems are stored. The code works best if a function class is defined as a subclass of BoTorch's SyntheticTestFunction, passed through StandardizedFunction, and called using function_picker. See the examples. StandardizedFunction projects the function domain to unit-hypercube, which is assumed by the rest of the code (optimizers and exp_loop). function_picker provides a simple way of initializing the function while running the experiments.

• BoRisk/exp_loop.py: runs the full BO loop with the given parameters. Initializes the GP, uses the specified acquisition function to pick the candidate, evaluates the candidate, and repeats for the given number of iterations. It saves the output after each BO iteration, and can recover from the save data to continue an incomplete experiment.

• BoRisk/experiment.py: defines the Experiment and BenchmarkExperiment classes that are used in exp_loop.py. Provides the machinery required for running the experiments.

• BoRisk/optimization: The optimizers are defined here. Our optimizers are built around botorch.gen_candidates_scipy(), with added functionality to improve the numerical efficiency.

• BoRisk/acquisition: The acquisition functions are defined here.

• BoRisk/utils.py: Simple utilities for drawing constrained random variables.