Stochastic Cutting Planes for Data-Driven Optimization

We introduce a stochastic version of the cutting plane method for a large class of data-driven mixed-integer nonlinear optimization (MINLO) problems. We show that under very weak assumptions, the stochastic algorithm can converge to an ϵ-optimal solution with high probability. Numerical experiments on several problems show that stochastic cutting planes is able to deliver a multiple order-of-magnitude speedup compared with the standard cutting plane method. We further experimentally explore the lower limits of sampling for stochastic cutting planes and show that, for many problems, a sampling size of O(n3) appears to be sufficient for high-quality solutions.