Recently, Professor Zhang Jianghua from School of Management, in collaboration with Dr. Zhang Gongbo and Professor Peng Yijie from Peking University, and Professor Zhou Enlu from Georgia Institute of Technology, published online the research result, “Asymptotically Optimal Sampling Policy for Selecting Asymptotically Optimal Sampling Policy for Selecting Top-m Alternatives”, in INFORMS Journal on Computing, which is one of UT-Dallas 24 journals. Professor Zhang Jianghua is the co-corresponding author, and Shandong University is the corresponding author affiliation. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under a major program.
Many decision problems in reality can be abstracted as selecting a set of best performing alternatives from a pool of alternatives. The research proposes a novel sequential sampling method for the problem of identifying the top m best alternatives for efficient resource allocation. The paper rigorously defines the asymptotically optimal sampling ratio for the first time, and proposes the necessary conditions for determining the asymptotically optimal sampling ratio. The research constructs the sequential sampling decision as a stochastic dynamic programming problem and proposes a dynamic sampling strategy defined as AOAm (asymptotically optimal allocation). Unlike existing strategies, AOAm does not rely on any asymptotic condition, but can be shown to achieve asymptotic optimality. The experiment shows that the AOAm strategy has significant advantages over existing strategies, especially in the case of large variance. The AOAm strategy has good application prospects and can be directly applied to important management decision problems such as emergency evacuation and investment portfolio.
INFORMS Journal on Computing is a quarterly journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), belonging to one of the top journals in the field of management UT-Dallas 24 journals list. It accepts only about 40 academic papers per year and enjoys a high academic reputation in the international management community.
Original link:
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/ijoc.2021.0333
