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Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by codesushi42 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:09PM (#21337223)
Not very interesting. You see allocation problems solved all of the time in finance, and this blog post doesn't have anything new.

I also doubt that it's optimal. An implementation using Hierarchical Risk Parity for instance would be more interesting. I assume you can model risk/uncertainty here.

By the way, Google has an OR tools framework that implements these kind of solvers for you:

https://developers.google.com/optimization

Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by ltbarcly3 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:22PM (#21337335)
I think you are probably right, this does not seem optimal, it doesn't even seem that they recognized the class of problem that this is? It seems like they are attempting to use a greedy algorithm on a problem which very obviously has local extrema.
Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by codesushi42 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:28PM (#21337389)
It seems like they are attempting to use a greedy algorithm on a problem which very obviously has local extrema.

Yep. You'll end up with a lopsided allocation, with one or two allocations holding a very large percentage of the total allocation.

Distributing the allocation weights could help, e.g. with ensembling, regularization or some other kind of penalty.

Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by twic on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @05:13PM (#21339072)
There's also COIN-OR:

https://www.coin-or.org/

When i compared them a year or so ago, my conclusion that OR-Tools had more focus on engineering, making the whole thing easy to integrate etc, whilst COIN-OR had more sophisticated solvers, and gave you lots and lots of knobs to tweak.

Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by bulldoa on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:24PM (#21337355)
Are there recommended resource for understanding and applying these type of problems? I am quite interested in optimization and its real life application, currently reading linear optimization by bertsekas
Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by codesushi42 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @03:04PM (#21337751)
Take a course on discrete optimization. There's one on Coursera.

Convex optimization is also useful if you care about optimizing convex functions. Which I bet you do.

Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by 1000units on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:13PM (#21337257)
Uninteresting comment. You see critical, speculative comments that offer no technical insight on Hacker News all the time. I also doubt the article was read. Demonstrating actual effort and understanding would be more interesting.
Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by codesushi42 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:15PM (#21337273)
What kind of insight did you want? Simply Google "portfolio optimization" and you will find many more interesting techniques.

This is a basic LP problem that you'll come across in a textbook.

Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by marktani on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:22PM (#21337336)
How many HN readers read about OR before? Haven't read the blog post yet but it seems like a nice way to refresh my knowledge from some obscure lecture I attended about it ~5 years ago ;)
Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by 1000units on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:22PM (#21337338)
Here's an interesting comment with an interesting reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336687

By contrast, you effectively said, "Heh, I've seen fancier models. BTW, you can just plug your stuff into Google."

Re:Solving a linear optimization problem on incentive alloca... by codesushi42 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @05:58PM (#21339489)
BTW, you can just plug your stuff into Google

Well, yeah, for something so rudimentary. Use a library. Nothing to see here.