The power grid is a complex and vital system that necessitates careful reliability management. Managing the grid is a difficult problem with multiple time scales of decision making and stochastic behavior due to renewable energy generations, variable demand and unplanned outages. Solving this problem in the face of uncertainty requires a new methodology with tractable algorithms. In this work, we introduce a new model for hierarchical decision making in complex systems. We apply reinforcement learning (RL) methods to learn a proxy, i.e., a level of abstraction, for real-time power grid reliability. We devise an algorithm that alternates between slow time-scale policy improvement, and fast time-scale value function approximation. We compare our results to prevailing heuristics, and show the strength of our method.

Exact Gaussian process (GP) regression has O(N(3)) runtime for data size N, making it intractable for large N . Many algorithms for improving GP scaling approximate the covariance with lower rank matrices. Other work has exploited structure inherent in particular covariance functions, including GPs with implied Markov structure, and inputs on a lattice (both enable O(N) or O(N log N) runtime). However, these GP advances have not been well extended to the multidimensional input setting, despite the preponderance of multidimensional applications. This paper introduces and tests three novel extensions of structured GPs to multidimensional inputs, for models with additive and multiplicative kernels. First we present a new method for inference in additive GPs, showing a novel connection between the classic backfitting method and the Bayesian framework. We extend this model using two advances: a variant of projection pursuit regression, and a Laplace approximation for non-Gaussian observations. Lastly, for multiplicative kernel structure, we present a novel method for GPs with inputs on a multidimensional grid. We illustrate the power of these three advances on several data sets, achieving performance equal to or very close to the naive GP at orders of magnitude less cost.

Many practical applications require solving an optimization over large and high-dimensional data sets, which makes these problems hard to solve and prohibitively time consuming. In this paper, we propose a parallel distributed algorithm that uses an adaptive regularizer (PDAR) to solve a joint optimization problem with separable constraints. The regularizer is adaptive and depends on the step size between iterations and the iteration number. We show theoretical convergence of our algorithm to an optimal solution, and use a multi-agent three-bin resource allocation example to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Numerical simulations show that our algorithm converges to the same optimal solution as other distributed methods, with significantly reduced computational time.

Exact Gaussian Process (GP) regression has O(N^3) runtime for data size N, making it intractable for large N. Advances in GP scaling have not been extended to the multidimensional input setting, despite the preponderance of multidimensional applications. This paper introduces and tests a novel method of projected additive approximation to multidimensional GPs. We thoroughly illustrate the power of this method on several datasets, achieving close performance to the naive Full GP at orders of magnitude less cost.