Spectral Risk Measures, With Adaptions For Stochastic Optimization

Abstract: Stochastic optimization problems often involve the expectation in its objective. When risk is incorporated in the problem description as well, then risk measures have to be involved in addition to quantify the acceptable risk, often in the objective. For this purpose it is important to have an adjusted, adapted and efficient evaluation scheme for the risk measure available. In this article different representations of an important class of risk measures, the spectral risk measures, are elaborated. The results allow concise problem formulations, they are particularly adapted for stochastic optimization problems. Efficient evaluation algorithms can be built on these new results, which finally make optimization problems involving spectral risk measures eligible for stochastic optimization.