Learning the Center and Radius of Wasserstein Ambiguity Sets for Data-Driven Decision Making

Abstract

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is commonly built around the empirical distribution, with the ambiguity radius selected from a concentration bound. Although this construction provides useful statistical guarantees, it can be conservative and does not fully exploit predictive information about the underlying distribution or the difficulty of a particular decision problem. We develop a more flexible framework in which a predictive model determines the nominal distribution and a separate model estimates a data-dependent radius. The key requirement is not that the ambiguity set be centered at the empirical distribution, but that it contain the unknown data-generating distribution with the desired probability. We establish finite-sample guarantees and asymptotic consistency for arbitrary learned centers, derive tractable reformulations for non-uniform discrete predictive distributions, separate predictive-model and scenario-discretization errors, and prove stability under simultaneous perturbations of the center and radius. We further characterize the oracle conditional-quantile radius as the smallest conditionally valid rule and introduce a split-conformal procedure for finite-sample marginal calibration. Experiments on newsvendor problems, synthetic portfolios, distribution shifts, and real financial data show that learned and calibrated ambiguity sets can improve reliability, but do not automatically yield smaller radii or better decisions. Overall, the proposed framework treats calibration as a practical mechanism for reliable decision making rather than a universal guarantee of improved optimization performance.