Title: On the Hardness of Inventory Management with Censored Demand Data,
Abstract: We consider a repeated newsvendor problem where the inventory manager has no
prior information about the demand, and can access only censored/sales data. In
analogy to multi-armed bandit problems, the manager needs to simultaneously
"explore" and "exploit" with her inventory decisions, in order to minimize the
cumulative cost. We make no probabilistic assumptions---importantly,
independence or time stationarity---regarding the mechanism that creates the
demand sequence. Our goal is to shed light on the hardness of the problem, and
to develop policies that perform well with respect to the regret criterion,
that is, the difference between the cumulative cost of a policy and that of the
best fixed action/static inventory decision in hindsight, uniformly over all
feasible demand sequences. We show that a simple randomized policy, termed the
Exponentially Weighted Forecaster, combined with a carefully designed cost
estimator, achieves optimal scaling of the expected regret (up to logarithmic
factors) with respect to all three key primitives: the number of time periods,
the number of inventory decisions available, and the demand support. Through
this result, we derive an important insight: the benefit from "information
stalking" as well as the cost of censoring are both negligible in this dynamic
learning problem, at least with respect to the regret criterion. Furthermore,
we modify the proposed policy in order to perform well in terms of the tracking
regret, that is, using as benchmark the best sequence of inventory decisions
that switches a limited number of times. Numerical experiments suggest that the
proposed approach outperforms existing ones (that are tailored to, or
facilitated by, time stationarity) on nonstationary demand models. Finally, we
extend the proposed approach and its analysis to a "combinatorial" version of
the repeated newsvendor problem.