Best of Many in Both Worlds: Online Resource Allocation with Predictions under Unknown Arrival Model

Online decision-makers today can often obtain predictions on future variables, such as arrivals, demands, inventories, and so on. These predictions can be generated from simple forecasting algorithms for univariate time-series, all the way to state-of-the-art machine learning models that leverage multiple time-series and additional feature information. However, the prediction quality is often unknown to decisions-makers a priori, hence blindly following the predictions can be harmful. In this paper, we address this problem by giving algorithms that take predictions as inputs and perform robustly against the unknown prediction quality. We consider the online resource allocation problem, one of the most generic models in revenue management and online decision-making. In this problem, a decision maker has a limited amount of resources, and requests arrive sequentially. For each request, the decision-maker needs to decide on an action, which generates a certain amount of rewards and consumes a certain amount of resources, without knowing the future requests. The decision-maker's objective is to maximize the total rewards subject to resource constraints. We take the shadow price of each resource as prediction, which can be obtained by predictions on future requests. Prediction quality is naturally defined to be the ℓ_1 distance between the prediction and the actual shadow price. Our main contribution is an algorithm which takes the prediction of unknown quality as an input, and achieves asymptotically optimal performance under both requests arrival models (stochastic and adversarial) without knowing the prediction quality and the requests arrival model beforehand. We show our algorithm's performance matches the best achievable performance of any algorithm had the arrival models and the accuracy of the predictions been known. We empirically validate our algorithm with experiments.