Plausible Screening Using Functional Properties for Simulations with Large Solution Spaces

When working with models that allow for many candidate solutions, simulation practitioners can benefit from screening out unacceptable solutions in a statistically controlled way. However, for large solution spaces, estimating the performance of all solutions through simulation can prove impractical. We propose a statistical framework for screening solutions even when only a relatively small subset of them is simulated. Our framework derives its superiority over exhaustive screening approaches by leveraging available properties of the function that describes the performance of solutions. The framework is designed to work with a wide variety of available functional information and provides guarantees on both the confidence and consistency of the resulting screening inference. We provide explicit formulations for the properties of convexity and Lipschitz continuity and show through numerical examples that our procedures can efficiently screen out many unacceptable solutions.

Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grants DMS-1854562, DMS-1953111].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2021.2206.