On Feasibility of Sample Average Approximation Solutions

Abstract: When there are infinitely many scenarios, the current studies of two-stage stochastic programming problems rely on the relatively complete recourse assumption. However, such assumption can be unrealistic for many real-world problems. This motivates us to study general stochastic programming problems where the sample average approximation (SAA) solutions are not necessarily feasible. When the problems are convex and the true solutions lie in the interior of feasible solutions, we show the portion of infeasible SAA solutions decays exponentially as the sample size increases. We also study functions with chain-constrained domain, and show the portion of SAA solutions having a low degree of feasibility decays exponentially as the sample size increases. This result is then extended to multistage stochastic programming.