Zero-Regret Performative Prediction Under Inequality Constraints

Wenjing Yan, Xuanyu Cao

Keywords: Performative prediction, decision-dependent distribution, inequality constraints, primal-dual algorithm.

Abstract: Performative prediction is a recently proposed framework where predictions guide decision-making and hence influence future data distributions. Such performative phenomena are ubiquitous in various areas, such as transportation, finance, public policy, and recommendation systems. To date, work on performative prediction has only focused on unconstrained problems, neglecting the fact that many real-world learning problems are subject to constraints. This paper bridges this gap by studying performative prediction under inequality constraints. Unlike most existing work that provides only performative stable points, we aim to find the optimal solutions. Anticipating performative gradient is a challenging task, due to the agnostic performative effect on data distributions. To address this issue, we first develop a robust primal-dual framework that requires only approximate gradients up to a certain accuracy, yet delivers the same order of performance as the stationary stochastic primal-dual algorithm without performativity. Based on this framework, we then propose an adaptive primal-dual algorithm for location families. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed adaptive primal-dual algorithm attains $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret and constraint violations, using only $\sqrt{T} + 2T$ samples, where $T$ is the time horizon. To our best knowledge, this is the first study and analysis on the optimality of the performative prediction problem under inequality constraints. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our algorithm and theoretical results through numerical simulations.

Submission Number: 5975