Designing Ambiguity Sets for Distributionally Robust Optimization Using Structural Causal Optimal Transport

Abstract

Distributionally robust optimization tackles out-of-sample issues like overfitting and distribution shifts by adopting an adversarial approach over a range of possible data distributions, known as the ambiguity set. To balance conservatism and accuracy, these sets must include realistic probability distributions by leveraging information from the nominal distribution. Assuming that nominal distributions arise from a structural causal model with a directed acyclic graph G and structural equations, previous methods such as adapted and G-causal optimal transport have only utilized causal graph information in designing ambiguity sets. In this work, we propose incorporating structural equations, which include causal graph information, to enhance ambiguity sets, resulting in more realistic distributions. We introduce structural causal optimal transport and its associated ambiguity set, demonstrating their advantages and connections to previous methods. A key benefit of our approach is a relaxed version, where a regularization term replaces the complex causal constraints, enabling an efficient algorithm via difference-of-convex programming to solve structural causal optimal transport. We also show that when structural information is absent and must be estimated, our approach remains effective and provides finite sample guarantees. Lastly, we address the radius of ambiguity sets, illustrating how our method overcomes the curse of dimensionality in optimal transport problems, achieving faster shrinkage with dimension-free order.