We study the out-of-sample properties of robust empirical optimization problems with smooth φ-divergence penalties and smooth concave objective functions, and develop a theory for data-driven calibration of the non-negative “robustness parameter” δ that controls the size of the deviations...

In this paper, we study the out-of-sample properties of robust empirical optimization and develop a theory for data-driven calibration of the “robustness parameter” for worst-case maximization problems with concave reward functions. Building on the intuition that robust optimization reduces...

We formulate a distributionally robust optimization problem where the deviation of the alternative distribution is controlled by a φ-divergence penalty in the objective, and show that a large class of these problems are essentially equivalent to a mean-variance problem. We also show that while...